


Not Forgotten

by Kimra, krisham



Series: Not Forgotten [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Blood, Blood Magic, Canon Compliant, Dark Magic, Gen, Gore, Horror, Human!Castiel - Freeform, Imprisonment, Magic, So much blood., TW: Blood, TW: needle use, Thriller, Trauma, season nine, set between S09E08 and S09E09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:44:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 37,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kimra/pseuds/Kimra, https://archiveofourown.org/users/krisham/pseuds/krisham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire Novak was your average girl until the day an angel took her father away forever. Five years later things have changed, for better or worse and she’s determined to get her father back from Castiel no matter the cost.<br/>(Set between S09E08 and S09E09)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krisham/gifts).



> This story was written and inspired by the lovely art work of [Krisham](http://archiveofourown.org/users/krisham/pseuds/krisham) for our submission to the 2013 Supernatural Reverse Bang Challenge.
> 
> Set between S09E08 and S09E09. Spoilers for all pervious episodes.
> 
> Disclaimer: This story is no more, or less, consistant than any official Supernatural episode.

_**Prologue** _

The house is sick with age. Its edges creek and groan in protest to every searching movement within. She steps with care over rotten floor boards, and through broken doorways. Cautious of splintered beams and snagging nails. She does not belong in the dank musk, amongst the dust motes illuminated through persistent sunbeams and the scent of decay. She’s small and fragile and smells of clean soap and detergent.

She keeps searching, moving from one room to the next, determined enough to only jump at each rattle in the dry walls, or the scratching in rooms already checked. Determined enough to push on when every primeval instinct is screaming at her to leave.

“Hello?” She calls, and it comes out too loud, bounces through the holes in the walls and fills the house. Only her echo bounces back to her, then the distant rumble of a car engine.

She stills, pushes strands of blonde hair back from her eyes and approaches one of the boarded windows. The sun peeks inside and she peeks out at the pickup truck pulling up on the gravel driveway. Another instinct makes her reach for something that isn’t there, the emptiness against her ribs makes her twitch her hair back behind her ear one more time.

Two men get out of the pickup, large and cased in plaid and leather, one with a cowboy hat and the other a shotgun.

She backs away, quickly, foot catching on a stray floorboard. She takes the fall gracelessly and scrambles up again, wide-eyed. She hears the men outside take note of her noise.

She doesn’t wait to hear what they want. She backtracks, takes the stairs two at a time to the second floor, and finds the old master bedroom with its rot ridden bedding and empty cupboards. She’s breathing fast as the men enter the house below, heart pounding in her ears as she scrambles with the closet door. She digs her nails into the soft wood and pulls the door closed behind her, breathing sharp and shallow as she stares out between the venetian slats.

When the blood’s stopped pounding in her ears she can hear them stomping through the house. The house makes twice the noise in protest, but their ruckus drowns it out.

“Where’d it go, Jack?” It sounds like it’s directly below here, but the walls all have holes and she’s not sure exactly where they are.

“Think it’s upstairs.”

“Go away, go away,” she begs in a whisper, but they still stomp up the stairs towards her. She curls in tight, the smallest knot she can become, cornflower blue eyes fixed on the cupboard door and beyond, waiting for the inevitable.

“Thought these things liked bright places.” They’d moved to the stairs, making their way higher.

“Like you’ve ever seen a Aigamuxa before.”

A scuttle in the walls drowns out the other man’s reply and her breath halts completely, eyes skipping around the closet space. She’s sitting below a hole in the roof, large enough for a small person to fit through, but she’s not going up there, it’s what else might be up that that makes her scoot silently back to the other side of the closet. She fixes her eyes on the dark recess until a shotgun blast thunders through the house and silences everything else.

There’s a scuffle, the thud of flesh bodies slamming with bruising force into walls. More shots, and she’s not sure how close they are, but she knows these walls won’t keep a bullet back. She can’t curl any smaller, but she shoves up into the furthest corner hoping.

Something moves in the wall behind her head. Something dragging on the inside directly behind her, clicking like nails against corrugated iron. It’s hard to hear over the shouting of Jack and the other man, hard to hear over shotgun rounds being fired off, and impossible to hear when the first horrifying shrieking pierces the house.

“Bloody hell, shoot it in the head already!” Not-Jack’s shout is followed by another shotgun blast and the silence ricochets outwards. Whatever was squealing that noise is dead now, she’s sure, and in the silence she can no longer hear the thing in the walls, can not be sure if she ever heard it.

She’s not ready to dismiss it, doesn’t need to, because as she strains to hear there’s a dragging noise from the hole in the roof. She looks up to see a foot blinking at her. The absurdity of it detracts from the horror, until she realizes there is an eye, in a foot, staring at her and creeping into her hiding place. She stares in blank horror as the eyed-foot braces against the wall and the rest of the thing slips down into her safety. There’s a crab quality to its movements, arms and legs mixed up, as it braces against the wall structure and lowers itself. It has no eyes, thick leathery skin and no eyes. It’s got a mouth though, full of teeth sharpened down to points, and a nose that sniffs at the air in her direction.

Outside there are more gunshots, but they are surreal in their distance, and the monster settles its rear on the ground then raises a foot up beside its head to point a blue eye at her. It blinks again, rapid flutters of an eyelid that should not be there, and its sharp teeth peak through its smile.

She looks to her exit, hands wrapped around her legs in a tight cocoon, and the thing shifts towards her.

It’s enough to trigger her. And she’s across the closet space and on it in a moment. It goes to screech, like its family outside, and she jams her small forearm against its throat to block its air supply. Clawed fingers scratch at her in panic as she tugs the silver blade from her ankle holster. The space is too small, and the monster too dependent on sight it can’t angle with its feet in such a small space, so she sinks the blade in between its ribs with little more than a grunt of effort, pressing tight to its windpipe and knife hand jumping up to cover any last death keens it might make.

She holds it in place, claws scratching through her white shirt, cutting into pale skin, and she waits until the thrashing of the monster has stilled below her. She holds for a minute longer, breath held and listening to the fight still going on outside. The clutter and bang of two men who don’t know what they’re doing, until there’s a final blast of the shotgun and silence falls again.

She’s breathing hard and fast, her arms and sides sting from the fresh cuts, but she doesn’t move, listening to the hunters as they gather their gear.

“That all of them?” Not-Jack isn’t far from her closet, she doesn’t move, knowing any movement will alert them at this point and she doesn’t want to deal with Hunters. Hates Hunters.

“Nothing else is moving, is it?” Jack grunts. Slowly they pack up, decide they’ve done enough. She waits half sitting on the bleeding remains of the Aigamuxa, a leg on her shoulder because she won’t move until her muscles give or they’re gone.

They’re lazy Hunters, though, and when nothing flies out of the walls to avenge its fallen comrades they call it a day and leave as loudly as they came.

She waits until the rumble of their engine has faded before she extracts herself from the tangle of limbs that clung and clawed. She leaves her blade in its chest while she breathes in the dust ridden air of the master bedroom. Still cleaner and fresher than what she’s just had.

There’s foreign blood on her blue jeans, her hoodie and shirt ripped by razor claws and her own blood is seeping out through the thin slices made of her flesh. She traces the cut on her face and flinches when she presses too hard. It’s her signal to move.

Her hair is loose, and blonde, splattered with drops of red. Her eyes cornflower blue. She’s small and fragile and smells of clean soap and detergent because she’s washed away the gun oil for today. Scrubbed it raw from her skin for just one day.

She tugs her knife from the monster’s chest, contorts one of the monster’s legs out into the illuminated room and begins cutting into the fleshy soles around the foot’s eye socket.

 

She has to sneak past the motel office, because even illuminated by dirty fluorescent lights blood is as stark as day. She should shower and change before anyone sees her, but no-one is in the car lot so she stops at the ice machine. She fills a plastic bag to half full, checks she hasn’t been noticed by any over curious traveller, and escapes to her room at the end of the block.

She drops her daypack and ice just inside the door, sliding the chain into place behind her. The room’s empty and still, the bed tucked in with military like precision, her travel bag sitting in its nook zipped up tight the way she left it. She does not move, counting to a slow ten, but nothing stirs. Her knife, wiped clean, she sets beside her as she checks her travel bag. Unzipping and checking the order of everything to be sure no-one’s rifled through it. Clothes, weapons, journal, vials, weapons. It’s routine, ingrained.

Her gun is at the bottom of the bag, she leaves the knife and takes the gun to do a sweep of the room. Checking the closet and bathroom to make sure all the corners are empty and safe, the window still latched and nothing disturbed or disturbing. Only then does she feel safe enough.

She washes the blood off her hands and arms, dried and tacky in patches, starting to itch. Buries her face in a sink of pink tinged water and scrubs with calloused fingers. Half clean, she plugs the empty sink and fetches her daypack. The cylindrical silver box she pulls out is upended into the sink and five eyes slop out into the white porcelain. They roll to a halt, optical nerves lagging like bloodied tails behind them. She checks each one by holding it up to the over-bright bathroom light, and all but one pupil contracts to a pin point under exposure.

The good eyes she puts back in their metal case, screwing the lid back and jamming the entire thing into the bag of ice for the night. She cracks open the bathroom window to throw the dud eye out into the darkness beyond. Something will take care of it for her, she’s confident. She sits the bag of ice in the sink for the night so she can shower and rest.

 

The sun’s barely snuck past the horizon when her phone starts to buzz. She blinks at the cracked roof and listens to it rattle across the bedside table inching towards the floor. She answers on the fifth ring with a coughed, “Hello?”

“Is mummy there?” David Littman. She knows the voice, has spoken to him four times in the last six months, each time with more frustration. Their latest exchange, though, had been promising.

“Do you have it?”

He laughs at her annoyance, finds it a pleasure to poke at wounds he can’t understand. “Do you have them?” he repeats.

She checks the bathroom sink before agreeing. “I have four,” she admits.

“They travel in threes.” There’s a hint of teasing in there, the same tone he uses for all his tasteless attempts at jokes. She’s not sure what it means. She waits him out. “How long will it take you to get here?” he relents.

The glance she gives her watch is pure reflex. It doesn’t have map co-ordinates or GPS, it’s just an old analogue Casio she keeps for sentimental reasons. She has to tap her memory for the information she needs. “Three days,” is her best estimate with a day to spare. “I’ll be there in three days.”

“If you’re not-“

“You’ll what? Find another seller?” She mocks the threat, because it’s stupid. Aigamuxa are few and far between, especially in North America. “Three days.” She hangs up before he can say anything else stupid. She’ll have to get more ice to keep them fresh, but it’s cold out and she plans to be very careful.

The phone she throws on the bed while she packs the room down. Her emergency wallet is still taped to the base of the bed with her spare gun. Her notes on the Aigamuxa are behind one of the gaudy framed pictures. She keeps one of the notes, slotting it into her journal, the rest are thrown away with her ripped shirt and hoodie, unnecessary weight.

The gun holster she shrugs on before covering it with the one hoodie she hasn’t ruined this month, slate grey and a little too large, but warm. Her other weapons tuck in below the folds of her clothes in quick easy succession, but she’s more careful with the silver knife when she slots it into the holster on her right ankle; she’s been bit by it before.

When she’s prepped she leaves, taking every trace that she’s been there with her. The man in the office barely glances at her and she passes just as unnoticed through the town towards the highway. There’s nothing left of her in the town but the wreckage of a hunt and a fake name.

The fake name grates at her, still ‘Claire’ because being called anything else makes bile creep up the back of her throat. But ‘Novak’ is too unique and hiding is easier than taking on a world of monsters out to use her to oust something so much worse. It does not stop the persistent itch under her skin that makes her want to tell every passing stranger the truth just to prove she is not ashamed of it.


	2. Part One – Preparation

_**Part One – Preparation** _

  

Castiel has a list, he repeats it in his head each day, checking off each item as it’s done. Turn on the lights, restock the hot food cases, fill the coffee urns, stock the dairy case, count the till, unlock the doors, bring in the newspapers. smile. He treats it like penance, each step must be done perfectly, each step can not be overlooked. Nora thinks he’s a godsend, he’s not sure if he should tell her how wrong she is, but suspects he’s learning the art of neglecting information adequately because he hasn't told her yet.

He cuts the newspaper stack open even as the door bell chimes the entrance of the first customer for the day. Castiel smiles, it feels awkward on his face, but the woman gives her own tired smile back at him and makes her way to the fridges along the wall.

He’s stacking the local paper next to the syndicated city paper when he catches the word ‘dragon’ and his attention shifts to the content rather than position of the stack.

“I’ll take one of them too?” His customer is at the counter, a gallon of milk and matching one of juice and her eyes on the paper. He takes two, scanning one with her other items and sending her on her way with that same stretched smile he’s trying to get right.

When the bell chimes her exit he turns his attention back to the article, “Here be Dragons!” followed by “Local witnesses swear their livestock are being stolen by dragons.” He scans the article, confused, because dragons don’t look anything like what is being described, and the article is frustratingly lacking in details. When he finds the death notice for a man living just near the dragon reports his curiosity is piqued.

The bell chimes out, twice in quick succession and he adds reading the paper to his list of tasks for the day, another little box to tick off as the day passes.

By the time Nora comes in he’s had time to read both articles, and decided he should have give it a closer look, just in case. Ephraim’s attack still weighs on his mind but he’s not ready to leave yet. He’s been human long enough to know there are practical matters that need to be handled before he can start hunting. But a local job, one that just needs a quick look, it shouldn’t require a suit, or a weapon. He can pop in tonight night and look around, be back at work before- no best not to risk being late.

“I may need tomorrow morning off.” He tells Nora and momentarily she looks put out, but then her expression soothes and she smiles and asks him if everything’s okay. He strains a smile at her as well, avoids answering her questions, but secures the morning off just in case.

  

Dean listens to the message through before turning the question to Sam; “Garth’s looking for a Byzantium Hand, do we have one of them?” He hovers his thumb over the ‘return call’ option waiting for Sam’s reply. “Or,” he adds trying to jog his own memory, “do we even know what that is?” Some days it’s hard to remember what they’ve seen and what they haven’t, freshly awake and hungry Dean’s having more trouble than normal. Maybe he’s getting old.

“Bobby had one, a few years ago. We haven’t seen any since.” Sam supplies, never shifting his focus from his laptop screen.

Dean still isn’t sure what it is they’re talking about, but he dials Garth back with Sam’s reply anyway. The next message is a telemarketer, and Dean listens to the whole thing just in case there’s a code amongst the jargon. When it became apparent there isn’t he wonders if maybe the person is possessed; they certainly sound dead inside. He decides to exorcise it by deleting the message and forgetting it ever existed.

It leaves him with no more burner phones to check and at a complete loss for what to do. They’d parked off the road for the night, unable to find a motel in town, and there is absolutely nothing to do besides dream of warm showers and a comfortable bed. He loves his baby, but there’s a limit to how comfortable you can get in a car, and he’s become accustomed to his memory foam. The only other thing he can think to do is revisit skinny dipping in the freezing lake they’ve pulled up beside. He eyes the winter laced water from the bench he’s straddling and there isn’t a single realistic desire to even attempt the fancy. He stacks the phones in two piles and shoves each into a jacket pocket stepping over the bench and approaching Sam.

Sam is tapping at his computer, perched on the trunk end of the Impala with one foot on the bumper bar and the other braced on the ground for balance. Sometimes the kids lucky Dean loves him, putting his feet all over his car like that. Sam’s entirely engrossed by whatever he’s looking at and Dean leans up next to Sam to sneak a peak. He’s as mystified now as he is bored.

If they’d been in a room Dean would have gone and gotten breakfast already, instead he’s trying to be patient because Sam had gotten that focused look mid stretch and gone off to geek town on his computer. At least that’s what he assumed Sam was doing, as long as it worked Dean didn’t stretch the details.

“What have we got so far, Sammy?” So sue him, he has a short attention span. Patience wasn’t working for him today.

“A great pile of not much.” Sam snaps his laptop closed, sets it on the trunk and stretches up to his full height elbows turning out and wrists twisted. The audible pop of his back makes Dean cringe in disapproval, the body didn’t need extra punishment in their line of work.

“So, we have cat sightings.” He starts, hoping to prod either of them in the direction of a revelation.

“Black cat sightings.” Sam clarifies, and Dean gestures vaguely in agreement because he knew that.

“And cat hair on all five bodies-“ he sees Sam’s look, “-black cat hair on all five bodies.” He stresses just to cut Sam off.

“But none of them owned a cat.” Sam grimaces at the discrepancy, but it’s what they live for, the little odd details in the hunt.

“All murdered at home,” Dean continues the list, “and all lived next door to each other.”

“Except for Kiyo and Jeff Fawkes.”

“Who lived three houses up, on the same street.” Another discrepancy, but this one is more important because it breaks a clean pattern. They were the usual neighbors in a large town; barely talked to each other and had little in common. All died in different ways, a heart attack, falling down stairs, choking on a steak (Dean felt only sympathy for the man), and a car accident, but the frequency and locations of each death had been enough to get them out of the Bunker. Dean was glad for the distraction right now, and Kevin was probably happy to have the place to himself for a while. “What are we thinking? Witches?”

Sam grimaces again, picking up his laptop. “Probably witches.”

Dean pushes himself to standing, “Great. I hate witches.” It’s the understatement of the week, but he feels it should be said. Witches were too human, too unpredictable, give him a simple wendigo any day, at least he knows what they want.

  

The shop is a confusion of aisles, boxes, and hanging charms. Claire ducks the parts of animals she can’t identify, hedges anything too non-descript, and wonders how tall people navigate the twisting maze of passages.

The main counters at the front, you can’t leave without passing it, and there’s a suitably old lady behind the counter who grins crooked teeth at all the customers. Claire’s looking for the other counter, the one at the back for real the customers, the ones who pay for things without money. She goes down one stairwell, turns a bend and finds an aisle of dusty boxes. Her fingers itch to open some up, find out what’s inside, but she knows better and keeps her eyes fixed at on the little table at the end of the as she walks past them.

He’s nothing to look at, or she wishes he was, because she has to look at him and there’s a missing ear that, like the boxes, she tries not to look at. He’s missing his front tooth, emphasized when he pokes the tip of his tongue through the gap and leers at her.

“Can’t be lost.” He murmurs, “did your mummy send me a treat?” David Littman is everything she assumed he would be, and a little less.

“I placed an order.” She hefts her daypack onto his little table, heedless of the mess she’s disturbing. His expression is only eager as she pulls out the melted bag of ice and drops it on his paperwork. She’s changed the ice several times over the last two days, but the last stop was four hours ago and the car she got to town in was overheated.

“Aigamuxa eyes.” She stops his eagerly reaching hands cold when she trains her gun between his eyes. His excitement is palpable and feels like thick sludge slathered across her skin.

“I placed an order.”

He sticks his tongue through his tooth gap, hands half outstretched and twitching.

“My order.” She wants to step back, give herself more room, but she won’t move away from the bag unless she has to. Counting each breath is a way to soothe the nerves fizzling in her chest as he assesses her threat to him. Apparently she’s threatening enough, because he’s hauling something up onto the desk next to her bag. It’s another cardboard box, no dust, but dented and worn.

“Right here.” He flicks the lid off and she stretches onto her toe to see check the contents without getting closer. She can see most of what she’s asked for, but not all.

“Where’s the oil?”

He looks bored, not apologetic at all. “It’s hard to come by.”

“We had a deal.” He flinches forwards when she grabs at her offering, and only the gun fixed on him keeps him from grabbing her. She’s sure of it.

“Four isn’t a nest.”

“Do you have the oil?” There isn’t any discussion to be had if he can’t supply his end of the deal. He curtails her retreat by lifting a jug up onto the table. It’s old pottery and the markings look right. She feels relief at the sight of it. It’s been the hardest object to obtain, not knowing any Hebrew hadn’t helped matters.

“The question,” he slinks, fingers curled possessively around the handle, “is what it’ll cost you when you only have four eyes.”

Claire forces herself to look away from the jug of oil. She knows how this game is played, and she knows exactly what she has to barter with. She just doesn’t know how much he’ll demand, and if she even has a line she won’t cross anymore.

  

Her daypacks emptied out on the floor, personal belongings, daily necessities, they’re all sitting there for David Littman’s perusal. It probably won’t be so easy, she doesn’t carry expensive things in her day pack, but witches have a way of finding value in the overlooked possessions. There’s a vague hope he’ll pick up a stick of gum and declare it a treasure but she’s braced to feel the cost in her bones.

He skims over her things, pokes at the crushed hex bag from the bottom of her bag and stops over her silver knife.

“Had it for a while?” He picks it up and she flinches feeling the touch under her skin where it has no right to be.

“A year and a half.” She upgraded to a larger blade when the old one was too small for her grip. He pokes it twice, and she feels each like a jab in her ribs. She grits her teeth and keeps her silence. If his seeking spells causing a reaction with the knife the entire process will not be pleasant.

“Not much on you.” There’s a creeping sense of pleasure in his tone, and she sits back on her heels to wait it out. Her lack of offerings and desperation are a feast for him to play with.

“I travel light.”

He moves into her personal space, hovering hands skimming over her shoulders, down her arms. There’s no contact, and she barely breaths, afraid to be the cause. He doesn’t seem to mind, hand running down before her face, another over the back of her shoulders. She can smell his breath, rot and aniseed as he assesses her.

“Blood.” He’s fast on his feet and has a bowl and her knife ready to take before she can even form the protest. She’s fast enough to snatch her wrist back away from his shaking hands before he can nick the skin.

“No.”

“You’ve got good blood.” He insists. “It’s not much. Half a pint from each hand. You’ll grow it back fast enough.”

“Not fast enough.” She won’t give him her hands because he seems the sort to take first and apologize after. “I need that blood.”

She watches his curiosity spring up, and no doubt he can remember what she’s ordered. It took her five dedicated, single minded, years to get her hands on the spell. It wasn’t free for her, and it won’t be for anyone she shares it with.

“Shouldn’t need much.” He needles but he won’t ask, there’s a courtesy to this.

“No blood.”

The silver bowls gone and her knife right back where she left it. David Littman is crouched opposite her on the floor, huffing and muttering a debate with himself.

“Charm bracelet and knife. On top of the four eyes.”

She feels the gold on her wrist, a heavy reminder. She’d forgotten it was there, so much a part of her that it no longer registers. She found it the day she snuck back into their old house, and she hasn’t taken it off again since.

She holds her wrist up for him, and he runs a finger along the thing chain. The feel of it slips down her spine like a block of ice.

“There’s a lot of you in it. Not as good as blood. But it will do.”

She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth to stop herself from saying no. It’s the only word she can hear, bouncing around between her brain and mouth trying to sneak out. She waits the panic out, sheet white and knowing this is a betrayal. He gave it to her, her father, and what else of his does she have left? But it’s worth it. It’s worth it. She just has to convince the protesting parts of her brain of it.

“You can have the bracelet, and the eyes. That should more than cover-“

“No. I wanted six eyes, now I want six things.” His petulance is almost childish, but she isn’t fooled.

“I’ll give you the hex bag.” It’s almost worthless, tapped out and overused, but she knows the value and power of personal artifacts. When he looks ready to try for another barter she unclips the bracelet and holds it out to him. “Six things.” She cajoles.

He takes a moment before snatching it away from her, taking the hex bag as well with a sullen pout. But she knows who won that deal, and so she offers no consolation as she gathers up the contents of her daypack and her new belongings. He’s so focused on his win that she doesn’t feel bad when she spies the keys hanging off his desk and she lifts them as well. She has too much to carry on her own, and she doesn’t plan to come back ever again.

She feels exposed with her naked wrist, vulnerable, like a layer of protection has been swept aside and left her alone. It’s only a piece of jewelry, she reminds herself, ratty cardboard box under one arm and urn of oil clutched in the other. She finds his car, a ratty little brown box of a thing and she shoves her things onto the passenger side recess and get out of there before David Littman can notice he’s missing a car. 

  

The room is silent, Dean and Sam both too surprised to break the silence as they stare back at their prey. The Jefferson’s lounge room was neat earlier that day when they’d come by to ask questions regarding the string of deaths on their street, now it looks like a mini tornado has gone through it.

“Not witches.” Sam lowers his gun a fraction, watching the bundle of black fur staring him down from the back of the sofa.

“Are they, just cats?” Dean isn’t sure, because that seems far to simple and doesn't explain why the deaths have been occurring. But it’s hard to argue when there are thirty pointed ears twitching about to catch the echo’s of noise around the room.

The cats are agitated, ones tails flicks hard enough to knock a framed photo to the floor. The resounding makes them all jump, hackles rising and tails puffing up.

“That”, Dean decides, watching the little things trying to look bigger “is adorable.”

“Dean.” Sam still has his gun up, but his shoulders are relaxed. There’s an eerie quality to the way they seem to be sizing he and his brother up but it’s hard to take them seriously when they are the size of house cats with just as much languor. One stretches, and at it’s shoulder blades two furred wings strain outwards to compliment the stretch. When the stretch is finished the wings lay flat against it’s back, but now they’ve seen it they can both see the same odd shape on all the cats around them.

“These cats have wings.” Dean eyes the nearest one suspiciously. It looks just like a cat and Dean might not be the biggest fan of cats or dogs, but compared to the things they see? Yeah, he doesn’t mind some extra limbed cats. “Are they even dangerous?”

“I don’t know.” Sam’s half shrug doesn’t even shift his aim from the nearest cat. “What do you suggest, we leave them?” Because that’s the other option, and of course they can’t do that. Whatever’s happening in this street is killing people, and maybe the cats aren’t responsible but they certainly don’t belong in the natural order of things.

“They’re just so-“ He goes to say cute, struck by a strange sense of nostalgia for when he’d wanted pets as a child as well, but the word is cut off when one of them launches itself at his face.

There’s no warning, and nearly shoots on reflex, arm flung out, but he has better control of his weapon than that.

“Dean!” Sam goes to shot the cat, but Deans hands are up and protecting his face and there’s no clear line of attack. The other fourteen cats take the cue to attack, and Dean isn’t happy to realize that their claws are much sharper than cats should be, and that furred wings actually assist the monsters in gaining height and purchase.

By the time he’s managed to shot three there are lines of blood being flicked about the beige lounge room every time he moves. The one on his arm he slams into the wall, and it makes an ungodly noise, not unlike that of a dying cat.

Dean smacks it down harder until the noise stops, then tries to deal with the next one.

  

Castiel isn’t sure how the day spiraled so much further out of control than normal. He’d gone to look up the ‘dragons’ and found a trail of scales leading out into the local forest. Apparently that had been a bad choice, he could recognize that now.

Angel blades are incredibly sharp and useful in a pinch so he’s glad he carries his around at all times, but they were not designed to saw the head off giant monsters. He is not investing in a saw this early in the game, the Winchesters never had one and he still needs to make the final payment on his FBI suit. 

“It would have been more convenient if you had perished closer to your nest.” He tells the head, sweat soaked and tacky. He will have to learn how to remove blood from his clothes, the Winchesters made that seem easy, but he has yet to figure out the finer details of laundering.

The head does not reply, quite dead and starting to smell in the close forest air.

Castiel keeps the thing off the ground, straining muscles made tired from the battle. He had not meant to kill the child, but he defended when attacked and it is hard to repress millions of years of fighting instinct.

“Your mother will be incredibly angry with me.” Castiel keeps moving through the forest, there is no path, but he knows the Unk Cekula will be at the top of the highest mountain. It is how she always roosts when she forgets the laws laid down before her.

The forest is dark, and close, keeping the warmth trapped around him. He moves sluggishly, tired and still not used to it. There are things that keep surprising him as a human. The weariness that makes you want to sleep in the middle of unsafe ground is yet another of these things.

“I hope your siblings are not causing as much trouble as you were.” He is not the sentimental sort, but he feels bad for the creature. It is not its fault it was brought into the world without understanding the rules. It is not its fault it did what instinct dictated it to do. It does not stop it from being dead, and Castiel knows eventually it would have moved on to attacking people. The Unk Cekula’s children always escalated, which is why they were always slain.

He does not talk again for some hours, legs shaking, blood splatter diluted and washed away with sweat, and ready to drop his burden and forget the trek. The cave entrance is almost a pleasant sight, and he lifts the horned head higher and makes his approach with far too much cheer.

The Unk Cekula waits for him inside the cave, glowing red eyes fixed on his approach.

“I err-“ The words escape him for a moment. Her child was larger than he was, scaled with metal and voice of thunder, but she dwarfs the size of her child. He reminds himself of the things he has done as human and angel, that he is not dwarfed by this creature, no matter how much smaller he may be. “I bring you your child.” He holds the head between them, raised by the horn. “He strayed his path, as your children must, and was punished.” His arm is shaking under the weight of holding the head aloft, he lowers it a fraction and in the cave those eyes narrow. He forges on, determination his only remaining strength. “I return him to you in respect of your loss. Do not turn your grief into wrath. Let this matter rest.” He has never done this before, but he knows the words, so he waits until his arm is too tired to keep going, and sets the head down at the cave entrance.

The Unk Cekula never moves, a rumble in the mountain top all the sign of her wrath as it follows him in his retreat.

Exhaustion strikes him when the adrenaline wears away, and Castile falls asleep on the forest floor, shielding by a tree at his back, and nothing else.

  

The car runs out of gas sometime around three in the morning, and Claire manages to roll it onto the side of the road before the momentum fails. She’s stopped to get her other bags along the way and they take up the space of the back seat so she locks the doors and crawls into the passenger seat instead. Her jacket’s too small to cover her whole body, but she curls herself into the smallest ball possible to try and maintain the warmth.

Outside it’s cold, the windows fog up and there’s the potential for snow with the bite in the air. She thinks she’s too far south for that now, but can’t be entirely sure. Tomorrow she’ll be further along.

She waits out the silence of the night in her little ball, limbs touched with cold, and the passing flash of headlights her only company. She waits, awake, for the sun to crest the horizon.

  

“Next time I think something looks cute, remind me of this.” Dean’s disinfecting his cuts with a stolen bottle of iodine and a dirty rag. His right arm is in tatters, but the rest of him has fared better.

“I don’t know Dean, I think they liked you.” Sam doesn’t snicker, but it’s a close thing. He knows exactly how to rile up his brother and he’s only to happy for the relatively light hunt after so much drama.

Dean doesn’t point out how well things liking him usually works out for them but he does jab Sam in the shoulder where he knows one of the cats got its teeth in.

“Hey!”

“And why are you driving?” He’s revved up and excited to be going home, driving would give him something to do, even if he’s currently got his hands full.

“Because I got mauled by four cats and you got the other eleven.” Sam’s attention is on the road, making Dean wonder if he can get a second jab into Sam’s wounded shoulder unscathed.

“Must have known you were a dog person.” He decides not to risk it and screws the lid back onto the iodine. The road’s gotten bumpy, poor surfacing, and he doesn’t want to risk spilling the stuff in his baby. Now the sting in his arms has eased out into a constant simmer Dean’s happy to pay attention to something else.

There’s a brown car on the side of the road they coast past, the Impala’s high beams throwing it into stark relief. It’s a 1980’s Datsun and Dean would have left it on the side of the road to rot as well.

“Reckon we sorted the problem?” Dean’s looking back out the rear window at the little car just because he’s bored.

“We killed all the cats and there weren’t any other signs to indicate anything unusual. We’ll just have to keep our eyes on the papers.” Sam flicks the lights down to low beam when another car appears on the crest of the hill ahead of them, putting them back up the moment the other car has passed.

“True.” Deans taps the dashboard and watches out the windows for anything to distract him. He doesn’t want to sleep until his home. He doesn’t believe there’s any point having a bed if you don’t use it and he doesn’t want Sam to leave him in the car asleep when they get back.

It’s a long drive back to the bunker and both of them are too tired to even check on Kevin before crawling into their respective beds.

  

Castiel’s late for work and he knows it’s becoming a habit. He wakes in the middle of the forest while the sun is rising and the journey down the hill is interrupted by the rumble of his stomach and the thread of twisted ankles.

He has to sneak in the back to scrub himself down in the employee sink, locking the door and rubbing soap and water over himself as efficiently as the small room allows. At night, when Nora isn’t there, he has more time to be particular. Today he settles for passable, stuffing his dirty clothes in the rucksack he’s hidden at the back of the cleaning products and going out front to help Nora out with the days work.

Nora smiles at him and when she’s free gives her instructions. He feels a little disjointed having missed his morning routine, but he’s not only made it to work, he’s survived another day, both achievements he feels pride for.:

Living is so much harder than he ever realized it would be.


	3. Part Two – Summons

_**Part Two – Summons** _

  

The truck pulls up slowly, the weight of the freight pushing it along the road past the intersection and the driver smiles at her apologetically.

“You’ll be okay?” He asks as Claire cracks open the cab door letting in a blast of desert air.

“My uncle lives down the road, not far.” She smiles softly at him, a smile she’s perfected because she’s too small to look intimidating even at seventeen. She’s taller now, but she takes after her mother and she’s got all the soft features and slight build that make her seem weak. She’s had to fight twice as hard to prove she isn’t.

“He going to be home?” The driver is a nice man, a little salt and pepper in his hair, and a beer gut to contend with the best of them, but he’s had her in the truck for four hours and his eyes and hands never strayed. Her smile for him is genuine.

“He’s expecting me.” She assures.

“Got some water?” He reminds her of her own father, and now she has to force the smile to stay in place as she carefully lowers her bags out the door and down the step.

“Yeah. I’m no stranger to these parts. Got some food as well.” She’s replaced the cardboard box with a wheeled suitcase and carefully packed it all so nothing rattles. The driver unbuckles his seatbelt to help, so she hurries to get it out before he can touch it. He’s nice, but she’s not risking anything to someone else’s hands.

He sees the effort and doesn't offer to help again, it flushes her with gratitude. She’s been on the road for so many years now, using her gun when ‘no’ was never enough, and the reminder that there are good decent people always shocks her through.

“You’re daughter, she’s very lucky to have you.” He’s been talking about the newborn on and off, worried he wasn’t home enough for her, worried he would mess it all up, and the assurance is all Claire has to offer this stranger. He beams and she decides that’s enough. Outside of the cab is hot and the sun beats down over the surrounding desert. “Safe driving.” She slams the door and steps away from the road, dragging her bags back so they are clear of the giant wheels as the truck rumbles back into life.

She watches it disappear down the road, waiting in the beating sun until the break lights are no longer visible. She hefts her travel bag up onto her back, her day back strapped over her chest, and drags the purple suitcase behind her as she strikes out away from the roads into the desert.

  

The little airport isn’t old, but it’s been forgotten, abandoned in a rush to escape a poltergeist. There’s nothing supernatural in the building anymore, but the lingering reminder of it’s wrath is palpable in the derelict remains of the business. There’s a small airplane rusting on the tarmac, sand blown in against it’s wheels to wedge it in place.

The airport has five hangars, wall to wall, each with its own curved cylindrical roof and large windowed double doors leading into each. There’s as much sand holding them closed as there is holding the rotting airplane to the tarmac. She drags her bag across the hot sand, wheels clogging and catching in a terrain the case isn’t designed to withstand, but she uses brute force to get it to the side door.

She’s been here before, scouted it out, and left things behind. Made sure it was free of people and monsters, but the door is still jammed up with sand. It creeps into everything in these parts, so she has to drop her bags and singe her fingers digging it away from the metal door.

She secures the door with a thick chain once she’s stepped through.

Inside is cooler, even with broken windows and missing tin paneling there’s shade to protect her. She walks through the first room and second, both empty, and the third with two ultra lights at either end, and stops in the fourth. There’s an old gasoline truck tucked up by the hangar doors and a few office desks along the back wall, but the space is mostly empty. Claire leaves her purple case in that hangar by the table before moving into the last hangar.

There’s a small office at the back of this last hangar, a tap connected to an outside tank that hasn’t rusted through yet. She washes the sand off her face, scrubbing the gunky residue of it from her eyes and pores, swishing the tangy water around her mouth before spitting it back into the brown sink.

There’s an old solar power system on the building, no one came back to retrieve it when they abandoned the place. It works for her, but there’s something wrong in the system and the lights flicker when they’re on but it helps her navigate the security set up. It was good in it’s day but like the rest of the building it’s been chipped away with sand and time. She does a quick job rewiring the broken alarm. The results aren’t perfect, it flickers on and off when she tests it, but she’s on a schedule and now she’s come this far she’s willing to sacrifice that one assurance in the face of the isolation the place offers. She had picked it for a reason after all.

She sets to unpacking her travel bag. She puts the food and water in the office she’s set aside for herself, clothes and bedroll all neatly arranged under one of the benches where she’ll have her back to the wall. She kicks out a small part of the tin wall, bends it out of shape so she can wiggle through if something happens in the night, then hides the hole with an empty filing cabinet. Her day kit she packs for bugging out, and sits it next to the cabinet. Escape strategy she moves onto the bigger goals.

Her first aid kit is usually well stocked, but she’s branched out for this. Even if everything goes smoothly there’ll be patching up to do. She’s learnt through necessity how to use everything in the kit, so it’ll be fine as long as she has enough. It’s possible she’s bought too many bandages, but over prepared seems a better option. She puts it at the foot of her bed, then sit backs on her heels to look over her nest.

It’s safe, concealed, and all the essentials are in easy reach. It’s also the best she can do, better than she can normally do, and she’s knows time is running out. There’s a limit to how long she has for everything so she sets to preparing the room for the spell.

  

She roughly cleans the second last hangar, starts at the table up against the back wall, and pushes everything off it onto the floor. Then she sweeps the entire room, pushing the mess of sand and broken glass through into the central hangar and shuts the door between them. There’s nothing she can do about the gasoline truck but the hangar is huge and there’s no foreseeable reason for it to be in the way. For all intents and purposes it’s empty.

She gets the hammer drill and power cord out of her travel bag in the office. She’s not good with the tool, but she picks the center of the cleared out hangar and spends the next thirty minutes drilling into the smooth cement flooring. She screws the eyebolt into the new hole, finding a wrench to help knock it into place, as secure as she can make it in the time she has. Again she settles for what she has despite the nagging in her head telling her it isn’t enough, because she doesn’t have a choice. She’s been on the move since she bartered for the spell, and tomorrow night’s her last chance to cast it before the year ticks over. She could wait, she knows logically she could wait, but she also knows that every time she delays she’ll only think of more reasons to delay and time has already slipped through her fingers while she hunted out her answer.

She’s covered in dust when it’s done, and so is her cleared area, so she gets the broom out and sweeps it down once more before throwing a few buckets of water around the area and scrubbing the space and table down. She won’t risk contaminants in her workspace. Not for this. It’s too important. The water sloshes around the room and coats the floor, but it dries quickly, even in the dark the desert air is dry.

When it’s done, and she checks the area once more then she washes herself off at the sink in her office. Wiping herself down with a wet towel to remove the same potential contaminants and changing into something clean from her bag. She pulls her gun holster back on over the clean brown shirt and straps the knife back to her ankle where it belongs. Neither weapon will help her in this, but she feels naked without their company.

Clean she returns to the second hanger. It’s been dark outside for some hours, the lights flickering above her and barely helping, but it’s better than her little torch. Carefully she lays out her purple suitcase and unzips the case. Then with methodical care she removes each item, laying it on the cleaned table and checking it against her journals list to be sure she has the required ingredients. It’s the fourth check she makes since getting the last items, but she can’t help the obsessive checks. It’s not worth risking, nothing is worth risking.

Each item has a place, marked on her diary, and etched in her memory. Bowls in the center, bone white candles at each end of the table, ceremonial knife to the right, pestle to the left. The case is large and it’s full, and at the bottom, cocooned in white towels is the urn. She sets it aside for the last item, also wrapped in white cotton towels but less breakable.

She unwraps the silver chain, heavy and cumbersome, and slots them through the eyebolt in the ground. She lays each rune etched cuff on either side of the eyebolt and fixes the chain and bolt with a matching padlock. She bites into the pad of her thumb to break the skin and rubs a line of blood over all the silver and eyebolt. The spell she mutters is short and the runes flare, blood seeping in through the metal and fading from sight. But it’s there, in the chains, just like the other offerings she’s made to keep the spell fresh.

The scented oil she’s more careful with as she pours it in a wide circle around the chains fixed to the floor. It’s a large circle, maybe too large, but like all things she errs on the side of caution. There’s not enough oil to do this twice anyway, if it all falls apart she’ll have to procure more. But it won't. She’s determined to get this right. There is too much at stake.

Exhaustion takes her as she looks over her work. She checks her watch and allows herself three hours to sleep before sunrise when the first step has to be taken. She settles on her bedroll in the office and at first she can’t sleep, so she pulls out her diary and traces over the steps she has yet to do, the list of things she’s set out on the table, the words she has to say just right, and eventually she convinces her body to sleep. It only lasts four hours, but when a strong breeze throws something against one of the hangars, and she’s started awake again there’s nothing for it.

  

As the sun rises Claire Novak sits at the edge of a oil ring, on her left is a ratty diary page opened to a chant she knows by heart, beside it in by her knee, a zippo lighter lid open and ready for quick use. Across her knees sits the angel blade she nearly died on during her fifteenth birthday when a demon had tracked her down to Washington.

She has no other weapons, no other way to fight the tide she’s about to summon, but she can not feel her fear over the adrenaline pushing through her system. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be. She glances at the charcoal marks she’s drawn on her palms, and the matching ones in the center of the circle before her. She looks one more time at the diary, just to fortify herself, and as the sun slowly creeps over the horizon she lays her hands palm up on her knees and starts to chant.

It’s melodic and straining, high and awkward, and when the passage ends she returns to the beginning, again and again, as many times as it will take. The stronger the target the longer it takes, so it is no surprise it takes time before she feels the first pull in her hands and a wind picks up inside the building.

That’s when she taps down, one hand on her lower ribs, the other to the marker in the circle. She feels the magic seep out of her, it’s an ancient ritual, and the charcoal filters the power out of her and transmutes it into the spell. Each tug of magic hurts, but she maintains, gives all the energy she can, lets it drain the strength of her soul outwards and further. Hunting out her target.

  

Castiel stares at the bandage falling from his forearm in the reflection. He had thought it was secured well, but an hour of movement has shaken the wrapping lose. He takes the dangling end and tucks it back in and the movement pulls the entire bandage down to expose the wound.

Castiel despairs, it had taken him half an hour to get it on using just his left hand and now all the work is ruined. He’s taken a moment for himself in the bathrooms, they have not been used by any customer today and remain clean for now. He thinks this is important for healing, cleanliness.

The wound is reddening at the edges, maybe poisoned or infected he can not tell, but he knows his care is not sufficient. It is, however, not a large enough wound to seek medical assistance for. He will ask Nora, when she comes in for the afternoon rush, and if she insists on seeing the wound he will have to lie to her. He is not good at lying yet, although he has employed the skill several notable times it has never worked particularly well for him. Dean is right, of course, that lies are necessary, especially for hunters, they simply make him feel uncomfortable and awkward.

The bells chime and Castiel surrenders his attempt at self maintenance. He tugs the useless bandage off and rolls his sleeve back down. Then tucks the bandage into his pocket and steps out of the restroom.

“Hey Steve.” Jennifer Decker is at the magazine stand, but she throws him a wave and a glance before turning back to her celebrity gossip. Castiel can not remember if she has introduced herself or if he has only read her name off her card when she makes payment.

He steps up behind the counter, goes to straighten his vest and realizes he’s left it in the washroom. He waits her out rather than retrieve it. She does this every two days, there is only one new magazine on the shelf, but she will still take her time looking over what’s on offer.

When she steps up to the counter she has a magazine he’s sure she bought the week before, but she’s smiling pleasantly and her hair is sticking in every direction and he is not sure if it is more polite to let her buy the thing she doesn’t need or to tell her she’s in error. The variables worry him, make him feel a little nauseous, so he takes her card to process and doesn’t say anything. It’s the little life decisions that cause him the greatest troubles. When to smile, when to laugh, when to say you’ve heard the joke before, when to stay quiet and let everyone make their own mistakes.

“Hey, nice tie.” She’s leaning on the counter, maybe in his ‘personal space’ but he’s not even sure what that is. Dean seems to have it clearly defined, but Castiel's noticed that it is an inconsistent distance so he has trouble pinning it down. Enough exposure to the Winchesters has taught him that they don’t expect him to know these things, but everyone else? Everyone else seems to expect it.

“I’m trying it out.” He explains waiting for the sale to go through. It is not uniform and when Nora comes in he may have to take it off, but there is a sense of familiarity to wearing the tie that makes him feel more like his old self. And if he was to hunt, to be a hunter, he needs to feel as unbreakable as he used to be.

He hands her back her card, purchases in a plastic bag and she’s still leaning over the counter towards him. “I thought you were leaving soon, Steve.” Maybe, he decides, she did tell him her name. This is friendly behavior so perhaps names have been exchanged. His own name, printed on a plastic pin for the world to see, does not signify anything but a reminder to himself of who he is now.

“As soon as I have adequate finances.” There is no point going in half cocked, and he does not know the world well enough yet to dive head first into it. At least not with some cash in his pocket so he can eat. Food and water have become his mantra since Metatron.

“Yeah, I know how that goes.” Her smile is bittersweet and as she turns to leave he feels a sharp pull in his lower stomach.

He goes to call out to her, confused. He’s getting used to responding to people more emotionally, but this seems excessive. He doesn’t manage to voice the call, only reaches a shaking hand in her direction before his stomach cramps and he doubles over to clutch at it, pain spiking out from the inside.

He pants out breaths, tries to gasp more in than he can take, and his body betrays him with a second jolt. Around him the world trembles, everything shakes, but nothing moves. He realizes he’s shaking, not just the tremble of his limbs, but something is literally shaking him on the spot. The world around him is blurry, moving too fast and he knows this is not good, not normal. He feels himself being tugged again, harder, more forcefully and he focuses on the room around him and the phone he’s pulling out of his pocket. He has multiple numbers in his phone, they all lead to the same people, he tries for Deans main line anyway, but the phone in his hand is just as blurred as the rest of the world. He thinks of stale coffee, of newspapers, and a plastic bench, he thinks of overly cold air-conditioning and the afternoon sun light sneaking through the windows. Anything to ground himself as the phone rings at his ear.

Another sharp tug, and he gasps unfocused.

“Cas?”

“Dean.” He gasps it out, voice uncooperative, “Dean, something is very wrong-“ He thinks about Dean and Sam, safe in their bunker, he thinks about where this attack is coming from and how he might not be able to fight it. For a moment he thinks and his grounding is lost. With one more tug Castiel loses.

  

Jennifer Decker forgot to buy gum for her boyfriend. She’s at the car when she remembers and it’s worth it to walk back to the store just for a few moments of peace that afternoon. He can talk chewing gum, but he doesn’t do it as much.

She expects Steve to be at the counter still, she’s only been a minute, but he’s not there. “Steve?” She calls out and she is met only with silence and an empty store.

  

The line goes dead. Dean takes a moment to process that Cas won’t finish telling him what is wrong because Cas is no longer there. “Cas?” He repeats, just in case the line hasn’t just been cut, but there is only silence as his reply. He’s deciding what to do; call back, panic, laugh it off, when he notices Sam is sitting on the other side of the table looking worried.

Dean gives a jerk of a shrug ends the call and picks up his coffee with as much nonchalance as he can manage when his brain is rocketing through concern and annoyance in equal parts.

“That was Cas?” The worried look on his brothers face isn’t lifting and Dean tries to dismiss the worry with a rough smile. Sam’s frown lines ease but do not disappear. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine.” Dean waves his coffee in dismissal. “Probably forgot how to lock his phone again.” He jokes to try and distract. It’s not working though, because Sam is leaning over to look at his phone and Dean has to intercept. “Use your own phone.” He snaps and goes to put the phone in his pocket before a slip of logic reminds him that answering a phone in your hand was faster than one in your pocket.

He holds the phone out of Sam’s line of sight and absently thumbs at the number pad. Sam has to stop looking suspicious before he can excuse himself and try and call Cas back.

Sam’s head tilts, suspicion rank, “I don’t have his number.” He’s only just realized this. “I didn’t think you did either, but apparently I was wrong.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs and sips his coffee, it’s hot but not burning. Sam’s still waiting for a reply and Dean’s holding a silent phone counting the seconds. Three minutes pass, Sam staring him down and the phone still hasn’t rung.

“Dean, call him back.” It’s an order, and Dean’s concerned enough to ignore the very important reason why he shouldn’t do it. He returns the call, phone at his ear, and eyes on his brother watching for any change. Cas’ phone is busy, and Dean thinks maybe he didn’t hang up properly or he’s called someone else, someone nearer. He hangs up, and Sam looks as worried as Dean feels. Cas has only called him once since they found him and that ended up being an angel out to atomize anyone who so much as thought a negative though. Dean can only imagine the thousands of things that could be going wrong enough to compel Cas to call him and he doesn’t like any one of them. In the end Cas is family, and Sam is the priority when he’s so ill, but Cas isn’t far behind on the list.

“Busy.” He offers wondering what he can say next. He’ll have to sneak out behind Sam’s back, have to hunt down Cas without his brother knowing. But the tone’s already set, Sam already knows, and Sam doesn’t realize that his life is at stake.

“We need to find him.” Sam’s half raised, and Deans ready to protest, when the change happens. Spine straightening, body stiffer, a flare of angel blue eyes and his brothers not in the room with him anymore.

“Zeke,” Dean grapples, “he was in the room. What was I supposed to say?”

“You should not still be in contact with Castiel.” Even his tone is overly formal, and Dean dislikes hearing Sam speak like that more than anyone else.

“Hey, he has my number.” Dean defends, “Lots of people have my number. We’re not exactly hanging out on weekends.” He’s done a good job keeping his last encounter with Cas off the radar and he has every intention of keeping it that way.

“Sam is worried.” Zeke tilts his head, looking at something Dean can not see. Looking through Sam.

“Cas is Sam’s friend.” Of course Sam is worried, Sam only didn’t worry about other people when certain angels have forgotten to give him back his soul.

“Cas is a danger-“

“Why don’t you explain that to, Sam?” Dean snaps, because he’s getting sick of this game. He’s tried to explain it once, cards on the table, tell all, and it’s Zeke holding up the process. He’s asking the impossible though, Zeke is stoic in response. “You got something I can tell him? So he’ll stop worrying about Cas? Because I’m out.” The challenge hangs between them, and Dean is tense because this could be make or break. Zeke is an unknown factor. ‘A good soldier’ Cas had said, but what did that even mean?

“If you can not dissuade him from seeking out Castiel, be warned that I will play no part in it.” The decree is stone, solid and heavy and Dean takes it eagerly. “I am too weak to risk exposure. But I warn you, Dean Winchester, if it involves angels I will leave your brother without hesitation.”

“Sure.” Dean’s agreeing but it’s too late, because Zeke is gone. Sam slumps down towards the table and catches himself. He blinks at the wood confused by the unexpected position.

“What?” He’s staring at his hands and Dean decides distraction is key. It’s worked enough times so far.

“Come on. Kevin can do a trace on the phone.” He sets off to find the prophet and Sam follows, confused.

“So can I.”

  

Kevin’s on his bed in the middle of a cluster of papers. Dean hasn’t been in here since they put him up, but the place has gone from Spartan organization to a mess of taped up papers and attempted translations. The desk has more pencils and pens than paper, and Dean couldn’t say what any of it is. He could only guess they all related back to the stone Kevin’s got sitting on his lap.

“Kevin!” He bounces in but doesn’t step on the muddle of papers.

Kevin looks up, dazed, and lets out a sigh. “Dean, what do you want?”

He feigns hurt but only for a second before he moves on. “I need to trace Cas’ mobile. Think you can do it?”

“Of course I can.” Kevin sounds affronted that Dean thinks he might have trouble. He gets up and uncovers his laptop, pushing piles of paper off the table onto the floor. “Why can’t Sam do it?” His look over Deans shoulder confirms that Sam’s followed him all the way here.

“He’s tired.”

“No I’m not.” Sam argues.

“Come on, Kevin. It’ll take you three seconds.”

Kevin already has the computer open and booted up, looking ruffled and resigned. “Sure, sure. Not like I have anything else to do.” Dean takes the sarcasm as a sign that Kevin’s still kicking strong and he pats the boy on the back grinning.

“That’s the spirit.”

  

Claire is in the middle of the chant, she’s been going for twenty minutes, easily, when there’s a resounding crack and the body of her father smacks into the ground directly above the charcoal summoning symbol. Her heart flutters, words stopped in shock and then she scrambles. Angel blade in her right hand, zippo in her left, flint sparked and wick lit, ready to ignite the oil. Her vision catches up with her before she’s lowered the flame and she hesitates.

She’s not sure if he’s breathing, she’s not sure if he’s alive. She can’t move though, can’t check, because this is an angel and what little advantage she has with distance she can not surrender. She stares though, because that is her father, that is his body, and if he is not breathing she does not know what to do. It’s possible she has to resuscitate, but that’s… an angel shouldn’t need that.

She’s panicking, frozen when he coughs out a lungful of air. She flinches, flame teasing towards the oil and now he’s breathing she should ignite the circle. It’ll hold the angel at bay when he gets up, but he’s not getting up.

The stress pulls at her, but she does not move, watching the rise and fall of his back and debating the new situation. He’s unconscious, completely at her mercy, for this moment and maybe only this moment she can make sure other parts of her plan go smoothly.

Asking him to chain himself, enclosed in a ring of holy oil was always a stretch, but she’d had contingencies. She didn’t need them now. She could just chain him herself. Easier. Either way, she knows, she has to move. It’s the reminder of the imperative that has her flick the zippo closed, snuffing the flame, and moving towards the prone body. She keeps the angel blade out, ready to stab or slice and defend but he remains unconscious.

Dragging him into place requires both hands, but by then she’s poked him and kicked him and he isn’t getting up. So she grabs and arm and pulls using her weight to counter his. She barely gets his wrist into the first shackle, but she can’t pull him any further, the second is better aligned, and she locks him in place with magic and silver. From the table she gets the blindfold, white and blue silk embroidered with Enochian sigils, and ties it around his head.

Only then does she check the pulse in his throat, strong, solid, real.

Only then does she sit back on the other side of the oil, oil that she didn’t even need, and allows herself to realize that the first step worked. Her heart hurts, her eyes sting, and now it’s done she can admit she never really thought it would work.


	4. Part Three – Chains

_**Part Three – Chains** _

  

She’s been sitting there for too long. She knows it but it takes so much longer to get her body to respond than it ever has before. She feels like she’s cloaked in tar, her movements heavy and strained. Her throat hurts, the price of magic filtered through words and lungs. She’s pulled a muscle or two in her arm dragging the weight of a body so much larger than hers. Above it all is the languor pulling at her and trying to drag her down into sleep.

When he groans, body shifting and the clink of his chains echo through the hangar, Claire remembers how to move. Once the memory is there the imperative returns.

Easy. It was too easy. It shouldn’t have been that easy. She’d allocated hours to the task and it took less than half of one. If the first step is easy, she’s learnt, the others will fight kicking and screaming.

Her feet try to fall out from beneath her when she gets to them, her body shakes and strains in all the wrong places. She feels the burn where spell the pulled the power through her body, and knows it will hurt for a long time still but it’s irrelevant. She steadies herself, breaths deep and keeps moving.

She doesn’t need to look at her diary to know the next step; she has an angel, she has to ward. So she gets the spray cans out of her case and heads back to the entrance. She starts there, using symbols that she remembers without ever having learnt them. This is a throwback, something he didn’t mean to leave behind, but it’s there and she uses it.

She starts at one end and finishes at the other, uses all the paint she has to keep any of his kind out of her business. Winchesters are harder to keep at bay if they get wind of it, but they are human and so much easier to plan for than angels. Isolation is her greatest strategy, and time. Less than twenty-four hours and it should be done, one way or the other.

When the wards are up she washes her hands and arms, scrubbing away filaments of paint that might contaminate before returning to the second hangar. He’s still unconscious, still a minimal threat, but she leans against a wall, angel blade in her lap again and watches him with half lidded eyes. She is tired, but she will have to do more soon. There’s a schedule to keep.

  

Kevin has no luck, even with all his nerdy know-how there are limits to what can be achieved.

“It’s out of range, or it’s been smashed to pieces.” He tells them, and Dean doesn’t even register an emotional response to that. He’s pretty much plateaued on the concern for now, not worse or better because he doesn’t have any more information yet. All he knows is Cas went from on the grid, to off in under fifteen minutes. Not impossible, but worrisome all the same.

“Well what now?” Sam’s looking at Kevin’s notes, and if he’s getting anything out of them Dean would sell his right arm.

“I don't know, give me a minute.” Dean’s stretching for an answer. He’s been hunting his whole life, they’ve lost people before, and most the time they’ve found them. He choses to ignore the times they’ve found them too late, that is not happening with Cas.

Kevin spins his chair away from the computer, eyeing them both like they’re idiots. “This bunker is a store house of the supernatural. There should be something you can use here.”

Dean checks Sam and his brother rolls his eyes, just a little, it’s agreement. “You okay in here?” Kevin just raises an eyebrow, all sass, and it pleases Dean to see the little geek so grown into himself. “Right. You have our numbers.”

Kevin waves them off, retrieves the angel tablet and goes back to staring at its runes. Dean feels a little bad that they leave him too it, but there is nothing either of them can do to help with the translation.

Sam leads the way to the storage rooms, he walks passed a few, the one with Crowley amongst them, and Dean assumes Sam’s gone through them before. Dean takes the left side of the room and Sam the right. He’s still sorting through his other experiences, dismissing spells, and curses, and technology they’ve used before. He doesn’t doubt there is something in the bunker that will work, it’s only a matter of how long it will take to find.

  

They move in tandem through the room, sorting through dust smothered boxes whilst being very careful not to break any of the jars and charms they pass. They are especially careful with curse boxes when they find them.

It’s Sam, less than an hour after they start searching, who lets out a puff of pleased surprise.

“Got something?” Dean moves to Sam’s side of the room and looks in the box. It looks like an old wooden tripod, a round crystal where a camera would sit. “Bobby had one of them.” Dean remembers and Sam knows, because Sam has it out of the box and out in the light.

“We used it to find Lilith.”

Dean looks at the thing as Sam unclips the legs and extends them. They’ll need a map and more importantly, the spell. “Do you remember the incantation?”

Sam frowns, probably trying to squeeze the knowledge out with will power, but “Not well enough to risk it.” is his final answer.

Dean does not hit the table, but only because it would do no good. The frustration is thick in his gullet and he wants to vent it. Killing something would help considerably, he considers Crowley just for the hell of it. It would certainly make him feel better, but it would solve nothing. “Well great,” he snaps, “where do you suppose we find it? I don’t know about you, but I ain’t seen Bobby for some time.” He nearly chokes on those words as well, he doesn’t really believe it was Bobby he saw in Sam’s mind, just a representation of him. But it felt real, very real.

Sam gives him a look of a long suffering sibling. “We could try the library.” He picks the device up and Dean has no choice but to follow deeper into the bunker.

“We have a library?” He double checks, because he really feels he should have noticed that.

“Where do you think we keep getting all those books?” Sam’s moving fast down the stairs and Deans a little worried that if he misplaces Sam he’ll get lost in the maze that the Men of Letters bunker is.

“From boxes, in storage?” Okay he hadn’t put much thought into it. Being told there are another thirty volumes on some obscure text tended to shut his brain down in horror before he had time to consider where they’re being kept.

The library doesn’t look big, but when Sam shoves the tripod at him and sets into the index card system Dean’s thinks there are a lot more cards than there are visible books on the floor. A little tickling desire to hunt out and find any secret rooms is squashed behind the more pressing matters.

“Maps?”

“Get one of ours. None of these will have any roads built after the 50’s on them.” Sam flicks through the little brown edged cards quickly. He clearly has an idea of what he is after, even if Dean isn’t as sure. Location spell, yes, but what book would have that? He liked research back when he could flick through their dad’s diary and find the information they needed. This is all too… big.

“Hey, remember that scene in Ghostbusters, with the librarian?” Dean can’t help remembering the index cards flying all over the place as he stares at the wall of index cards.

Sam pauses, gives him a look of incomprehension and moves on with his task. “Seriously? You want the library to be haunted?”

“What? No.” That would be bad. Any ghost that had hung around for fifty years building up it’s rage with nothing to vent it on would be the last thing he wants to deal with right now. “But you have to admit,” he is unwilling to let it go, “that scene was awesome.”

Sam does not admit anything, he just keeps searching and Dean feels fidgety with impatience and a concern he is trying to lock down and ignore.

He’s about to ask if Sam need’s help, feeling useless with the tripod in his arms and nothing else to do until they get back to the central room. Sam, however, is done with his index, a card in his hand and moving through the stacks to find the matching book.

“We got it?” Dean gets his phone out, checks it for missed calls and dials Cas’ number. The busy signal beeps back at him and he grimaces. He does not like not moving, he should be in his baby going places, but they have the tools here and it’s silly not to use them.

Sam returns from the stacks, one book heavier and a triumphant grin. “Got it.” All in all it takes them less than an hour and a half, and Dean knows that finding another hunter with the knowhow and equipment could have taken days. This time he leads the way out of the room.

“Lets just hope his angel warding tattoo doesn’t mess with this.”

  

Waking is difficult for Castiel. The need for sleep is dangerous, but waking tired is uncomfortable and challenging. Asleep he forgets imperatives, forgets what happened the day before and why he needs to deal with it _now_. Asleep he forgets that he didn’t go to sleep, but was tugged viciously into unconsciousness. So he drifts into wakefulness slowly, still tired but that’s not unnatural, sore but he was getting used to that as well, and blind.

Blind seems strange, odd, he’s sure he’s not blind but it takes nearly a minute for his mind to catch up with the signals his body is giving. He jerks his hands to his face and they are restrained, far short of their destination. He feels the warm metal wrapped around his wrists, and now he’s awake he feels the scratch of cloth wrapped tight around his eyes.

He remembers his last conscious thought now, remembers the spell that pulled him here. A summoning spell unlike any he’s experiences before, and powerful, excessively so. Whatever wanted him here didn’t give him a chance to say no and anything that wants him, angel or demon, he does not want to be at the mercy of.

“Hello?” His waking voice is rocky and low. “Is anyone there?” He shuffles backwards towards his hands, gives them more leeway, and he hears the chains clink behind him. Tied and bound. It is not a good way to wake up. “What’s going on?”

A noise surprises him, just a scuff of a foot on the ground, and he turns his head to face it, listening hard. It’s no one noise, it’s movement. The sound of cloth shifting, shoe rubber creaking against cement, the slightest chink of glass. There’s someone, small and quiet, in the room with him. “I can hear you.” He hopes pointing it out will make them speak, but he’s met with the same oppressive silence that makes it so easy to hear them move. There is no noise outside to distract his attention.

He shuffles backwards more, running his fingers along the chain and finding the circular hook they are anchored to. There’s nothing he can do with that without seeing it so he bends his head down to his hands, contorting to get his fingers on the blindfold. Each time his fingers pass over the material they refuse to catch. He twist further, fingers reaching for the knot he feels at the back of his head but again his fingers skim over the blindfold without really touching. With his grace he could possibly undo the knot, at least get his hands on it, but there is no grace left in him and the spell keeping the material fixed in place is going nowhere.

He uncoils himself, turns his focus back to those soft noises. He’s not sure what’s caused this, he has a list of things to long to bare consideration that he has done. A list of things some would want him to pay penance for.

“If I have wronged you-“

His captor scoffs. So he knows this isn’t random, they drew him here with something of his, something to ground him to this place. He didn’t know he had anything like that to work with, but he’s been flickering about the world for several years now, anything’s possible.

“I don’t know why I’m here.” He explains, careful and rational and terrified because he is alone in a world full of things that want to destroy him and he does not have the power to fight them.

The thing approaches him, light footsteps, careful and measured and almost silent. He thinks if he could see, distracted by something else, he would not hear it approach at all. He does feel the press of cold metal against his throat when it stops behind him.

“Stop talking now.” Her voice is soft and cold, but it’s the push of the blade up under his jaw that makes him fall silent. The blade is sharp, and she’s putting just the right amount of pressure behind it to not nick the skin. The threat is, all the same, very real.

She steps away again. A girl then, young, or a creature in the form or body of a young girl. Castiel does not like that knowing that does nothing to narrow down his list of potential assailants. He wants to pry, ask more, but he can still feel the touch of that knife on his neck and chained and blind he does not like his chances if he upsets the monster behind that voice. 

  

He’s silent for less than ten minutes. Claire checked her watch when he woke and checks it when he starts speaking again. Less than ten minutes to forget the threat. Maybe he doesn't realize it’s an angel blade and she’ll have to make it clear, but hearing him talk, using her fathers voice, burns anger low in her gut and she’s sure if she opens her mouth right now she won’t be able to stop screaming.

“You’re not very old, are you?” His movements are mimicked with the clink of chains and she casts a glance back to check on him. He shouldn’t be doing anything, the chains are bound to her will and blood, short of killing her he can not get out of them.

She drizzles oil into the large white porcelain bowl and rolls it around, coating the inside before trickling the remainder out into one of the two smaller bowls. With the small white square of silk she wipes the lip of the bowl and sets it down.

“Or she’s not.”

She’s ground the dried caraway, yarrow, and summersweet flowers in the mortar already, but she rolls the pestle through the fine powder to catch anything she may have missed. Then with care she sprinkles a fine layer of the powder over the oiled bowl. She sets the mortar and pestle aside to be washed before the next step, then checks her diary. She’s drawn the series of circles carefully in her diary, size and space and differences all distinct, and with her pinkie she etches out the same symbols in the oiled bowl.

He interrupts the process, “I don’t know why you’re doing this-“ and she slams her hand on the bench to keep the retort from escaping. The sharp pain grounds her and dulls to a sting immediately. Her hand is shaking when she turns back to the task, but she holds it still, controlling each breath and movement as she finishes the symbols.

She picks up the prepared bowl and the angel blade, then turns to face him. She approaches him carefully, aware of his ability to kick her with his legs unshackled, and keeping a distance from them as she sets her bowl down out of his reach, the angel blade pushed into the soft flesh behind the jaw and chin. With her free hand she pulls the blindfold off his eyes. She holds his head still, finger threaded in dark hair and glares into her fathers eyes.

“What about now?” She hisses, anger thickening her voice, “Do you know what you did now?” He looks blinding at her, searching for an answer. When he lifts his arm to touch her she shoves the blade in harder. His gasp tells her she’s cut but his arm drops back down to his side and she’s won that round.

“I’m sorry.” He swears. “For whatever wrong I’ve cause you. I am sorry.”

Hysteria tickles her lungs, threatens to spill out. “That’s all I’m worth?” She wants to drive the blade in hard and fast. Stab him a hundred times until he is dead. “A blanket apology?” She’s lived the last five years of her life hunting this monster down. She’s slept curled up in bathtubs in dirty motels, cradling her gun and praying no-one comes in during the night, she’s bled out red on a carpets and concrete, she’s given so very much, and he doesn’t have any idea who she is. “So I should forgive you everything?” She demands, feeling the bite of tears stinging her eyes. She does not want to cry in front of this monster, does not want him to know how much he has affected her, but the more she doesn’t want to, the more they push through her guard.

“No. You shouldn’t.” He watches her shocked, confused maybe, chained and bound and nowhere to run.

“Good.” She spits. “Because I wasn’t going to.” She reaches up to her tears, catches the drops of them on her fingers and flicks them into the bowl beside her. She stares at the bowl, the tear indistinguishable but she knows they are there. “At least,” she gives him a bitter smile, “that was easy for me.” The smile fades, tears still tracing tracks down her face, but the hardness is impossible to deny. “Not so much for you.” It is the only warning she gives before she grabs his face and slams his head back into the concrete.

He cries out in shock and she’s ready to defend herself, but there are tears in his eyes, and she catches them, flicking them into the bowl with her own. She didn’t think it would be that easy, that the angel would hurt so easily, she was ready to cut and order, and jam something into it’s eye socket. She’s unnerved by the easy, but she pushes it aside, retreating with the bowl.

At her table she sets the bowl down, and then lowering her voice she drones out the first verse of the Enochian spell she let another monster free to learn.


	5. Part Four – Casting

_**Part Four – Casting** _

  

The spell doesn’t require anything they don’t have, and as far as tracking spells go it’s a simple incantation that Sam pulls off on the first try, once he’s decided which of the various spells in the book work best in their situation. Kevin comes out to watch it, breakfast in hand, shoulders slumped and looking like he is ready to crash. It isn’t a good sign at nine in the morning.

“That’s in the middle of a desert.” Sam shifts the pendulum aside, finger on the marker point and leans in to get a better look, there’s not much to see though. The map of the States is vague in its details.

Dean’s got his road maps out. “Southern California?” He checks as he pulls that map out of the pile. He slides the map of the States off the table and unfolds the more detailed map of California. It’s ratty around the edges, and he’s circled a few good dinners and truck stops for future reference, but it’s also got all the local roads in thin yellow lines crisscrossing over the white outline of state. “Okay, do it again.”

This time the pendulum swings wild before settling back over the Mojave Desert. Dean marks it with his finger and finds not far from it the thin black line of a back road t-intersection. It’s better than no road at all, and shouldn’t be hard to find.

Kevin looks over to the map. “That’s going to take a day, at least.”

“We can do that in fourteen hours.” Dean agrees with Sam, but the ‘we’ is still bothering him. The idea that the angel in his brother might bail at any moment and leave him for dead is intolerable. But convincing Sam to not go out and help a friend…Dean has never been that persuasive.

It doesn’t stop him from trying. “We? I can handle this on my own, Sammy. You stay here and rest up.” He tries to sound casual and thinks it is as transparent as it feels. “I’ll just check what’s what, he probably just forgot that phones need charging.”

“And if there is a problem, you’re on your own, knee deep in a fight. It’s not happening, Dean.” Sam’s completely serious and just a tad suspicious. There isn’t enough deflection in the world to move that look from his brother’s face.

“Why would you go without, Sam?” Kevin’s incredulity cinches it, and any hope Dean had for keeping his brother safe goes out the window. He throws a nasty look at Kevin for that betrayal, it’s a complete waste because it just makes Kevin look more confused.

“Fine.” Dean surrenders. “But this is not my fault.” He says it to Sam, but he’s aiming for the Angel inside. “You hear me? Not my fault.”

“I hear you, Dean.” Sam replies, bemused.

Dean grabs the map from the table and heads out. If it’s happening they aren’t wasting any time on it. If Zeke had any way out of this he’d have used it already, Dean was positive of that. He just hopes there aren’t any angels involved in this mess.

  

He’s starting to feel better. He doesn’t think he can feel great, chained to a cement slab, but the nausea of the teleportation is starting to ease. He feels a great sympathy for Dean if the hunter had felt anything like this when being transported.

The room is large, and the sun streams in through the windows in the curved ceiling making the stale air hot. His skin feels tight and his throat itchy but he ignores it. The room has three exits, two matching doors on the edging walls and one set of double doors leading outside. He can see through the dirty glass tiles of the double doors, and beyond there is sand, scrubby bushes and distant mountains. It’s desert and he guesses there is nothing nearby for some miles. He is not sure how long a human body can survive in a desert without assistance, but he will risk it if he gets out of the cuffs.

The girl he watches carefully. She’s slight and sure footed, fine boned with sandy long blonde hair she hasn’t tied back, and icy blue eyes. She looks young and breakable to Castiel. She is also dressed in sturdy shoes , jeans and a long sleeved shirt she has pushed up above her elbows, with a holstered gun snug against her ribs for ease of access. It belies the image of vulnerability and confuses the image of her. A demon wouldn’t need the gun, nor an angel, most monsters seeking him out had their own weapons. The gun makes her seem entirely too human for his liking, just a witch with a vendetta he can not make out.

There’s nothing soft about the way she returns to his side, angel blade sure and ready while she takes a lock of hair, or the time after when she cuts under his chin and captures the trickle of blood that escapes on her fingers. She’s never there for long, but the angel blade is always sure and ready and he flinches when she cuts him, but it’s a small cut and she’s gone before he can protest.

He watches her at her altar. She is methodical, she checks her notes before going through each step of the spell she is working. For each piece of him she puts into her spell she mirrors it with a piece of herself. She nicks herself under the chin and smears that blood into the bowl with his own. She cuts a lock of her hair and twists it with his before igniting it. She holds the burning hair over the bowl, smoke rising into her eyes and flecks of ash falling in amongst the rest of the spell’s offerings.

She checks her notes again, and whispers words in a language he recognizes but can not decipher. He thinks it is a language he has not heard for thousands of years, gone in the minds of man, and left to be forgotten by all others. He thinks that this spell, with so much of him etched into it, is extremely dangerous.

“This is dark magic.” He calls out, voice scratchy and frayed. “Where did you learn this?” Spells like this exist, he has seen similar things before, but he is becoming more and more sure that she is human, and she should not have access to this sort of magic.

She does not turn, but she stills. He thinks she won’t answer, that she’ll keep going, but she surprises him when she turns her head to look at him over her shoulder.

“You left some things behind.” She taps her forehead, smearing blood on it, blood she does not know is there, and Castiel is distracted trying to understand what she is saying. “Nothing big.” She assures as she turns back to her alter. “But I’ve had time.”

Castiel does not take long to understand, staring at her still back. She is waiting for him to understand, the secret too important to keep. “Claire.” He tests it, because he still remembers her, still has a taste of affection Jimmy left inside him, and the memories he gleaned when she too said yes. He remembers why she said yes as well, so much easier to convince then Jimmy had been. _Save my parents._ That had been her price. But she was so much younger than the woman before him.

Claire was small, and confused and desperate and now she’s on the edge of adulthood chanting spells in languages he didn’t think humans knew anymore and spilling both their blood.

“Castiel.” She squares her shoulders and turns to face him. Now he knows, now he knows which face to compare hers to, he can see the same girl looking back at him. The girl whose heart he broke when he took her father the first time. He can not imagine how much more damage he did when he took Jimmy from her the second time.

He looks to the altar behind her, moon candles, blood letting knives, animal skins and silk, herbs and flowers and braided amulets. “You did not get this from me.” He does not know this spell, has never needed it, but there is also a limit to what the vessel sees. He was more rushed with Claire than Jimmy, but she should have been shielded from this sort of knowledge.

She turns back to her work. “I’ve had years to deal with what you left me. Put the pieces together. Fill in the blanks. Years.” She stresses. She picks up a bronze knife and he can not see what she is doing to her chest with it, but she sets the knife down bloody and then drizzles strings of blood from her cupped hands into the bowl. He feels sick, knowing that she is bleeding for this spell. Blood magic is dangerous, it corrupts and twists and he knew this girl once.

“Claire, this magic will twist you around.” It is a plea to the little girl he remembers, to the parts of her that might still be human enough to understand. “Nothing good can come of this.”

She laughs, blood sliding between her fingers, back to him. “There’s no good left to lose from it either.”

She chants in that same dead language. Her voice is wrecked, her arms shaking. He watches, trapped and horrified, as the lines of her veins start to burn white with power, as she taps into her soul to charge her spell.

  

She gasps and pulls back, breaking the pull on her core. She’s leant over the bowl, gripped the edge of the table and dripped blood everywhere. She pulls back again, fingers tugging off the table and leaving their own bloody smears. She stumbles in her escape, trips on her own feet and catches herself before she hits the ground.

He’s watching her but even that does not stop her shaking. She does not want to appear weak, does not want to give him the satisfaction, but her body will not obey the weak commands she tries to give it.

Sit down. Rest. She makes it to the wall to the last hangar, not the door, just the wall. Her shoulder jams into the tin and she slides down to the floor. There is blood on her, already too much blood, and she presses her hand to the seal she’s cut into her chest. Presses it hard to try and stop the bleeding, and is vaguely surprised to feel that it has already stopped.

She looks to find him watching her, but even that can not stop her eyes from closing and the world from tumbling out from around her as she falls into exhausted sleep.

  

Dean’s been staring at him since he started driving and to Sam it feels like a feather on the back of his neck; persistent, annoying, and childish. It irritates him to no end.

“Dude, stop staring at me.” Dean looks away on command, but his eyes fix purposefully out the window and it’s just as irritating. “I told you I’m fine.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure.” It’s all sullen obstinacy and it does nothing to calm Sam.

“What is wrong with you, Dean? I’m fine. You’re fine. And Cas is our friend. If he needs our help then I’m helping.” It should not take this much effort to make such a simple point clear. Sam is sure he should not have to say this at all, and it niggles at him that he does.

“Yeah, you said that already. But if you change your mind, you let me know.”

Dean doesn’t stop speaking to the door, but Sam’s known him for years, knows his tones and his shoulders and the way he avoid things. There is something bothering his brother, and Sam can not pin down what it is.

“You sure you’re okay?” The question causes Dean to scoff a half laugh.

“Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.” It’s no explanation and Sam wants to ask what he means, but he can’t quite get the question out, and by the time he’s got it sorted in his head Dean’s pretending to be asleep. He’s very good at pretending, but Sam knows this too about his brother.

Instead of calling him on it, he lets the pretense lie, watching the road as they speed through another state.


	6. Part Five – Strain

_**Part Five – Strain** _

  

Castiel watches her sleep, her small figure crumpled against the wall. There is nothing relaxed or comfortable about how she lies, only a complete surrender to exhaustion. He can empathize with that in a way he could not when they first met. Back before he’d decided on allegiances, when he’d still been toeing the line of obedience to the heavenly order.

She’s pale in sleep, and curls into the wall for protection from the world around her. A child still, smeared with blood, soul drained and pushed to her limits.

He’s done this to her. Whatever has happened to her since they last met is his fault. She has made bad choices, gone down wrong paths, the blood alone tells him this, but he is the reason she knows this world exists. There is no lie he can tell himself to lift that guilt from his shoulders. He stepped in, took her father, and left her behind without a single glance. All in the name of a god whose long since forsaken them all. He regrets many things he has done, murdered his kin, made deals with devils, and betrayed his friends, but he thinks maybe this was the worst of it all. Tainted an innocent soul with his arrogant disregard.

It is his fault, and looking at what has become of that little girl he knows it will burn in him for as long as he lives. But he does not want to die, and she is edging very close to killing them both.

This magic, strong enough to need to wrench out the power of her soul, he is not sure what its purpose is, only that he is very much the center of it. Revenge would be easy, a knife through the heart - across the throat - the human body is full of soft places that kill, but this is something more. Torture perhaps, but with magic, he is unsure. The end result, though, is clear. He will die here, at her hands, if he does not find a way out.

He waits until she is in deep sleep, because each clink of his chains makes her twitch at first. It does not take long.

Sitting up he shuffles back towards the anchor holding him in place. He shifts carefully over the bolt so that his arms are before him, his arms as free as they can be. It is not ideal, but he has access to his pockets for the first time. He checks for his phone first because calling for help might be the best chance he has, but it’s not in any of his pockets. He recalls using it, calling Dean before the spell had caught him up and brought him here. He does not recall what happened to it, is not even sure how long he was out. Long enough for her to chain him down and blindfold him in the least.

He checks she is still asleep and empties his pockets onto the floor beside him. She has not checked him for weapons, this would help more if he had had one on him. It’s an assortment of not much, things he’s found out of place in the store while cleaning and setting up that morning; a dirty coffee stirrer, an elastic band and a scrunched up piece of paper. He’s also got the store keys, which Nora will be livid about, and a small plastic lighter he found outside the store a week ago and decided might be useful.

He puts the useless things back in his pocket, keeping only the ring of keys. Then, eyes on the girl he carefully works the sharpest feeling key off the ring, clamping his hand around the others so the metallic chime of them hitting each other does not wake her. He puts the ring back in his pocket where they are hidden from his captor and turns his attention to the cuffs binding him.

The room is hot, the sun pouring in and making the air heavy. Sweat trickles down Castiel's back as he scratches the jagged edges of the key against the runes on the cuffs. He presses hard, indents in his fingers where they grip, and digs into the metal sewing line after line into the runes. When the first has a line through it he sets the key down and tries to dig his fingers in by his wrist to tug at the clasp. The chains rattle, but the cuff is fixed firmly, determined he picks the key up again and moves to destroying the next rune. The scratches are barely visible but he works his way around each rune on his left hand until they’ve all been marked, then once more tries to pry the clasp apart.

It does nothing. Either the spell is still strong, or he does not have enough physical strength to break the metal. He tries the bolt in the floor, wraps the chains around his hands and pulls at it, straining to break or bend the tether out of the ground. It does not even jiggle, and before too long his arms are sore.

He lets his arms relax before trying again, but after the third time he knows he’s doing nothing. The attempts are only wearing down the strength he has left, and he will need that if he can steal the key from her and get away. There will be no point if he has no strength left to fight with.

Resigned Castiel shifts back down so the stretch on his arms is tolerable and he can reassess. The key must be on her, in one of her pockets, but getting it from her will be challenging. The noise of the chains will inform her of any move he makes, but he will try it, when next she approaches.

For now she’s asleep, and he knows he should try to sleep himself so they are on a level playing field. He’s not sure when he’ll wake or what he’ll miss if he sleeps longer than her, but there is little he can do to stop her at this time anyway.

Carefully he lays on his side, curled around the bolt with his cuffed arms before his chest. He can see her from there, still passed out and unaware. Completely helpless despite her gun and her magic. Helpless and alone, and Cas is struck by her similarity to the Winchesters. In sleep they all look fragile.

It’s hot and dry and he thinks maybe he won’t fall asleep after all, but there is nothing else to do but wait and eventually the heat lulls him into fitful dreams.

  

She wakes to the persistent beep of an alarm. It drudges her up from deep sleep and she’s halfway through being annoyed at it when the reminder of the Angel smashes through and she is upright and blinking to clear her vision.

He’s awake, blinking at her from the floor, and he’s moved. Panic sets in for the time it takes her to be sure that he hasn’t moved far, just as much as the chains allow him. He sits up slowly, but she hasn’t convinced her body to move yet, still making sure there is nothing out around her. In the office her phones alarm continues to beep a wall and a door between them and it’s muted. But it’s done its job.

Her muscles feel thick and uncooperative, but she forces them into a coordinated jumble and pushes to her feet. It should be ten to five, which means she should have a few minutes to wake herself up more. She scans the room once, checks that the angel hasn’t moved again, and steps out of the room, leaving it on it’s own, to prepare.

Her beds still untouched, laid out and waiting for her, and although she’s tired it’s not a real temptation. Instead she turns her alarm off, checks the time and checks the next alarm is still programed in. Then she drinks down a bottle of water and devours one of her energy bars. She’s slept most of the day away and her body needs the energy. She takes a second and chews on it while she does her security check in the last light of the day.

The last hangar is clear, doors still jammed shut and angel warding in place. Nothing could have gotten into the second last hangar without alerting her or the monster, but she checks the room while the thing watches her. The other three hangars are all untouched, chains in place, and wards clear in the fading light. She’s finished the second bar by the time she returns to the office, so she finishes off another bottle of water and takes a bathroom break before checking the ramshackle security system to be sure it’s still trying to work despite the intermittent power.

Her face in the mirror, as she scrubs her arms down once more, is pale. Black bags under her eyes and a tint of red in her eyes that is natural, but not encouraging. She splashes water onto her face to try and break the feel of being submerged in molasses but it does nothing more than dilute the dried bloody mark on her face. Annoyed she towels her face and arms dry and returns to the spell.

  

She’s cleaning the blood off the bronze knife using oil and silk when he starts up again.

“I need to urinate.”

“No you don’t.” She sets the clean knife down, discards the silk square, and checks the sky through the windows above them. The flickering electric lights have started to illuminate the room, natural light slowly slipping away over the horizon, but not quite there. She swaps the bowl of blood and flowers for the large mortar, making sure the space around the stone dish is clear.

“And food.” His persistence grates at her nerves, and she touches at the angel blade resting on the edge of the table in warning. She hears him shift, hears the little exhale of surprise and thinks that will be the end of it, reminded as he is that she has the power to cut him through. “You believe… I am not what you think I am.”

“Yes,” She scoffs, “you are.”

“I am human.” She wonders what he’s thinking, even trying such a lie on her.

“No.” She’s seen what he is, felt it in her veins. It was like riding a tidal wave of energy and anger, an unyielding force strong enough to rip her apart from the inside out. There isn’t any part of him that is human, there never was.

“And I need to urinate.” She does not respond to him, retrieves the bottle of bone ash and, with extreme care, she tips the contents into the mortar. “Urgently.” She takes a breath to calm herself before adding pure alcohol to the mortar. She ignores him and sets the mixture on fire, the sharp bite of alcohol and the fine bone ash tickles at the back of her nose as she watches the alcohol burn away any remaining impurities. “Very urgently.”

The fire dies quickly, and still warm she lifts the mortar and tips the contents into the rest. It settles line castor sugar over her blood before slowly dissolving. She dips each thumb into the bowls mixture and chant’s, each word carefully pronounced as she has been taught, each word burning into her as the magic steals from her soul through a link forged in blood. She says each word even when her vision blanks to white and her knees try to give out below her and she feels the moment the sun sinks completely below the horizon and she is given another reprieve.

She takes a breath, drawing her thumbs from the red mixture, more her blood than anything else, and uses the back of her hand to wipe the sweat from her upper lip. She’s shaking, tired, and she knows she needs to rest again, soon.

“It is my understanding,” the monster continues, as if nothing has happened, and for him it hasn’t “that failing to urinate when required can cause severe medical damage.”

Without a word she steps out of hangar and returns with a bucket. He stares at it in confusion when she sets it far beyond his reach. She’s sure he can still reach it, but doesn’t care all that much. “Now shut up.” She leaves it there, taking up the same spot where she slept before, back against the tin wall the monster in her line of sight. Her body is shutting down, ready and eager for sleep, but he’s staring at her, scandalized.

“I don’t believe I can urinate with you watching.”

“I’m not watching.” He’s in the corner of her eye, but she’s intentionally not tracking his every movement. No matter what the monster is, that is still her father’s body and she’s not disgusting.

“Could you leave the room?” He tests and she almost laughs at the absurdity of it.

“Sure. I’ll leave you near a potential weapon.” She mocks, “Would you like me to unlock your cuffs too?” She checks his face, and there is a moment where he looks like he’s about to agree before understanding kicks in.

“Fine.” And he does use the bucket, and she is very attentive of a wall over his shoulder for the duration of the process. When he’s done she manages to convince herself to stand up and move the bucket further away so there is no chance of him using it as a weapon, then scrubs her hands down once more. She watches the diluted blood wash down the dirty sink in a pink swirl, then returns to the monster’s hangar to rest. 

  

Dean rubs sleep from his eyes and checks for road signs. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but clearly he managed it anyway.

“Where are we?” He checks when no road signs appear. Outside the window is forest and that could put them almost anywhere. “Pull over, I’ll drive for a while.”

“Halfway through Colorado. You sure?” Sam’s already looking for somewhere to pull off safely so Dean doesn’t bother to answer.

Dean stretches, unknotting muscles in his shoulder blades as Sam glides the Impala onto the edge of the road. “Where in Colorado?” He yawns the words getting out of the car, and squints into the darkness around them.

“We’re near Glenwood Springs.” Sam throws the keys to Dean as he steps around the front of the car, and Dean has just enough reflexes to catch them before they hit him in the face.

Dean has to process that on his internal map. He’s got most the country mapped, they’ve driven so many places in his life, and as a child he had nothing else to do in the car but read maps and remember places. “Making good time.” He slides into the drivers seat and starts his baby again, waiting for Sam to get back in the car. “Hey, Glenwood Springs,” Dean calls out the car window, perking up, “don’t they have the diner with those chili fries?”

From a step into the forest Sam calls back, “I don’t know Dean, I haven’t memorized every diner menu in the fifty states.”

Dean taps the steering wheel impatient to be moving, “Forty-eight, Sammy.”

“Just because you haven’t been there, doesn’t mean Hawaii and Alaska aren’t states.” His brother replies, getting into the passenger side. He’s looking a little annoyed, but it’s that annoyance Dean’s all too familiar with, and Dean knows it’s not real.

“But I’ve never been to a diner there, now have I?” He reaches over and flicks the stereo on, cassette tape buzzing to life and music flooding the car. “Rest up, Sammy.” He offers Sam a cheeky smile and turns the car back onto the road.

“With this racket on?” Sam’s incredulity is pure joke so Dean twists the volume up louder, the car rattling with the beat of the song. He sees Sam’s half smile in the corner of his eye, and he appreciates the company a little more for the easy banter and camaraderie.

Checking the time Dean accelerates past the speed limit, hoping there are no cops out this evening.


	7. Part Six – Preparation

_**Part Six – Preparation** _

  

Castiel has been tortured since becoming human and often times before, he thinks he maybe died once, or came incredibly close and yet he still finds the boredom of sitting in the middle of this room unbearable. He’s tried to wake her up, talked to her, and each time her eye has peaked open at him and then fallen closed again. He does not think she was even awake, just aware enough to assess his interruption as inconsequential before falling back into sleep.

He started feeling unwell some hours before, a tight feeling in his stomach and a pinching behind his eyes that made concentrating hard, so he’d laid back down to stop the spinning in his head, cataloguing the sensations only because there is nothing else to do.

He’s not happy when the ringing starts up in the other room, but it is a distraction from watching stars through broken windows. Night is well and truly set in, and the air has gone from pleasantly cool after the heat of the day, to bitingly cold. He thinks fondly of his blue work vest, his arms would still be cold, but it would be an improvement.

She gets up slowly, using the wall to brace herself and he’s sure she’s not aware of the action. She’s been careful around him but the cracks have started to show and there’s a tremor to her hands, slight but constant.

“Tired?” His voice cracks and he tries to swallow but his mouth is dry.

“Shut up.” She grumbles.

“You can’t keep this up.” He pushes himself up to watch her, but the world suddenly feels like it’s dropping out from below him. He stabilizes himself, knows his not moving, but can’t stop the sensation. He’s not going to panic, he’s felt this way many times since becoming a human and linked it to hunger. He breathes through it, and when the world has stopped it’s spiral he finds her watching him.

“You would say that.” She spits. “Besides, it’s nearly done.” She looks to the stars above them, and he cannot see anything extraordinary about it. Just stars, distant and burning, and the inky black of deep night.

He braces himself on the floor carefully, afraid moving will send him into another dizzy spell. “What are you waiting for?”

“The moon.” She’s leaning back against the wall and he realizes she hasn’t moved since standing. He doesn’t have a soul, at least he doesn’t think he does, but he’s seen the effects having it drained in a human, it’s only a question of how much she’s putting into the spell. “Dawn, dusk, and the center of the night.” They are steps in the spell, and he thinks maybe it was dawn when she started this. It’s been a long time since he woke up in this building.

The level of ritual involved in the spell, the power she’s using to fuel it, and the ingredients; these are the sort of things witches of old dabbled in, the sort of spells that brought angels down to smite towns, and destroy civilizations. Rarely did a witch survive the initial casting, or the wrath that followed, rarer still did the survivors share their knowledge.

“This kind of magic,” He tries to reason, “it will kill you. You’re draining your soul.”

“It’ll recharge, given time.” She pushes herself from the wall, closes her eyes and he knows the world is spinning for her as well.

“But the other damage-“ He can’t articulate it, what this can do to the caster, what is left of them when they do succeed. He wants her to see that this will destroy what is left of her, whatever she hasn’t eroded with taint already. “He would not want this for you.”

She moves, sudden and sharp, towards him, stops herself and her body sways momentarily. She does close her eyes again, but her hands are fisted and her shoulders tight, fingers wrapped around the angel blade turning white. “What he’d want?” She hisses, “What would you care-“ She cuts herself off, head turning away, body tense but not attacking. Her lungs rise and fall in slow controlled breaths.

“I’m sorry-“ He tries but does not get further before she is screaming.

“As if I believe you!” She jabs the angel blade in his direction, it’s not a real threat there is too much distance between them, but there’s a wildness to her eyes that stills him. She’s tired, strained, and entirely unpredictable. He does not want to die, and he is not sure how to handle or placate her. In the flickering light her instability is accented and terrifying. “Enough.” And she walks away, goes into the other room and leaves him alone. He counts the seconds, but they stretch on, the beeping still echoing through the cavernous room. He counts his heartbeats as they try to race out of his chest. He sits up, waits out the dizziness.

He knows with certainty now that he is going to die. If her spell doesn’t work she will burn herself out and he will be left to starve in an abandoned building on the outskirts of nowhere. If her spell works...it can not be good for him. This much blood, this much anger, this kind of spell could rip souls from hosts and shred them apart.

Desperate he wraps the chains around his hands and tries, once more, to pull them from their anchor.

  

Claire braces herself against the counter, she’s taken six painkillers and chased them with half a gallon of water. Looking at the energy bars makes her stomach cramp up. Even though she knows she has to eat, she also knows there is no force in the world that will keep the food down if she does, so it’s a moot point.

She turns the alarm off on her phone, and that’s the last one. No more warnings, no more stages, just this one and it’s done.

“Close.” She reminds herself, but it doesn’t stop her arms from shaking. “You can do this.” She pushes, it’s hard to encourage yourself, but the fact is she is nearly finished. There’s only the final markers to be carved, the final sigils, and she can do that. She’s never pushed so hard, but she’s never wanted something this much, nor had it this close.

From the monster’s hangar there’s noise, loud and metallic and she thinks he is escaping. It takes her a minute, a full minute of listening to that metallic clanking and the sound of raspy coughing before her body moves. In one solid push she grabs the angel blade, swapping it to her left hand and draws out her gun.

The alarm system hasn’t sounded but it’s unreliable, as flicking and useless as the lights overhead. At the door she takes a breath, relaxes her grip on the gun and then pushes through.

“Who’s here?” She demands, checking the room.

“I need water.” He demands right back, voice scratchy.

“You’re alone?” She scans the room twice more, gun leading the scan but there’s nothing. Just her table of spell workings, an old rusty gasoline truck and a monster in a circle of unburnt oil.

She knows she heard coughing but he supplies that answer when another fit takes him. She looks him over, his hands are read, link marks pressed into the flesh, and it’s clear he’s been trying to pull free. She’s surprised he hasn’t tried already, but she’s spelled them to hold against angels, against anything. Sigils and blood applied to carefully crafted metals. The warlock she stole them from had hunted her for two months before Claire had been forced to turn around and fight back. It had not ended well for either of them, but Claire had left alive with the chains and a spell to work them, so it was a win in her books.

“I need water.” He repeats, dry and raspy.

The weakness in his tone makes her pause and really look at him. There are bags under his eyes, a sallowness to his skin, patches of pink from sunburn and goose-bumps up and down his neck. He looks tired and vulnerable. For a moment, just a moment, she thinks what she is doing is hurting him. She fights the traitorous thought down, bullies it back under her sympathies and fears. It does not belong here today.

“I need water.”

She leaves the room, adrenaline working out the pain in her body and returns with two bottles of water. One she sets by her table’s leg, the other she pulls the label and lid off, then cuts the useless ring of plastic away as well. It’s as harmless as she can make it and she’s not sure why she’s bothering, but she hands the bottle over.

He drinks fast, half the bottle gone faster than she can measure, and she thinks about how she’s downed three bottles and still feels thirsty, but he’s an angel and they don’t need things like food and water. It makes her feel unsettled, watching him swallow down the rest of the drink in gulps, but when he looks up at her fatigued and says, “Thank you.” she has to step away.

“Don’t thank me.” She warns, because it doesn’t change anything. He can be tired and thirsty and need to piss, but he is still the monster who stole her father and his gratitude is as unpalatable as his wrath.

She returns to her table, back to him, and there’s time so she turns her diary to the last page and slides out the only photo she has left of her father. She stares at the picture, reminding herself of what the monster took from her and what she has to gain. She reminds herself that it doesn't matter why he did it, only that it was done. She looks at the smiling picture of her family and she lets the bitterness seize her and only when she is sure she will not waver does she pull out her lighter and start the ritual. Each candle lit with a word and a flame, each thought focused on the next step, then the step after that.

  

The intersection is completely missable, and even with the lights on high beam Dean nearly drives past it. Sam’s alert enough to point it out, has been since they hit the start of the road. Both of them are on edge, ready for the fight that’s probably going to happen and Dean’s still waiting for Zeke to freak out and run.

There’s mild panic he’s been ignoring for hours that this is going to go south on so many levels. But Cas is missing, and that’s a problem he can deal with, so he tries to focus.

Dean pulls onto the smaller road, he’d like to pull off the road but there is nothing but sand and scrub and he’s not risking getting bogged tonight.

“You see anything?” Dean peers out into the darkness, making out shapes of the mountains in the distance, and a few cactus trees but nothing else.

“Not a thing.” Sam pulls his phone out and puts it away just as quickly. “Out of range.” Then he’s out of the car, and any idea Dean might have been harboring of dumping his brother in a hotel and coming back is wiped clear away. He’s not even sure why he keeps planning it, there’s no way Sam would allow it this late in the game. “He’s got to be around here somewhere.” Unless he’s moved over the course of the day just as they have. “Dean.” Sam chides, and Dean gets out of the car, straining to see further than the light allows. The moon is high, but there are limits.

“What’s over there?” The side of the main road has a dune built up next to it. probably the by-product of a thousand cars pushing sand off as they pass. Dean’s not expecting much so when they get to the top of it he’s surprised.

“You see that?” Sam’s squinting into the dark, a pair of binoculars at his eyes and Dean nearly asks where he got them from but he’s trying to see further as well, and all he can really see is a distant light. He pokes Sam for the binoculars and gets them quickly enough. “Looks like an old airport.”

“Abandoned.” Dean agrees, the shape of the runway is clear, the hangar’s even more so. There’s even old planes rusting away on the tarmac.

“With lights.” Only the far end is illuminated, and the lights flicker from bright to dim in an indistinct pattern, but there’s habitation where there is light.

Dean checks what he can of the building. Seeking out irregular shadows in the full moon light, but nothing moves. “No guards.” Guards tend to be unstable to a fault in their line of work. Sam takes the binoculars and looks again.

“No road either. Guess we’re walking.”

Dean doesn’t like leaving baby behind, but this will give them any element of surprise they’ll need as well. Of course he’s not going without his weapons so they both go back to the Impala and retrieve their weapons duffle. Sam takes the bag, Dean leads flashlight in hand, both moving silently across the desert floor.


	8. Part Seven – Blood

_**Part Seven – Blood** _

  

She’s had her back to him for a while now, and he’s watched her each and every move as carefully as he can. She’s added things to her central bowl. Added ground powders he can not identify and each addition has been in sync with another chant, another twist of power.

He still feels weak, the water helped but mostly it made him more aware of the thirst a full day in the desert heat brought on. If he could reach he would have drunk the second bottle by her table, but if he could reach there he would have reached other more useful things. Instead he shivers as the ice of desert night works its way through his skin and sinks deep.

She’s not as affected by the cold, moving constantly and keeping warm. But she’s no better dressed than he is and he marvels at her ability to keep going. He’s done nothing all day, stuck on the floor and watching, he’s slept at times and been awake at others but he still feels the exhaustion. She’s been draining her soul.

There’s a quickness to her movements now, like she’s feeding of the energy of the task nearly done. It does not make him more comfortable, only heightens the fact that he does not have an escape or any hint of one. She cleans the ceremonial knives, wipes her hands down, picks something out of the purple suitcase and steps closer, angel blade in one hand and something tucked away in the other.

She stops halfway between the table and himself, and he sees the hesitation, the doubt. It buoys him and reminds him that this is a child not a seasoned witch or demon or demi-god. This girl has lived less than eighteen years, has spent less than five of those knowing about the dark parts of the world. It’s possible to fall in that time, fall fast and hard, but not the same way those with hundreds of years under their cloaks have. The hesitation doesn’t last, and she squares her shoulders back, grip tightening on the angel blade and steps up to him.

The blade she flicks to and holds on his jugular, and he can feel it press against the fluttering pulse there, a warning touch, light but willing to slice. It watches her face as she drops the diary next to them.

“Lie down.”

He doesn’t move fast enough, and the blade presses harder. It’s amazing how hypersensitive he is to something so slight, but he swears he can feel the exact pressure she puts on the blade and knows that just a little more and he’d bleed.

“No.” He tries to meet those pale eyes but without pressing into the blade he can not make the angle work.

“You think I wont?” And he finds her eyes but only because she shifts to see his., they are sharp, wide, and there is something terrible there he can not name.

“I think it would ruin your spell if you killed me now.” He reasons. It is his last resort, this defiance, and he knows it. There is no other gamble to make and this one is desperate but it is all he has left.

She cuts him, it’s fast and unexpected, even though he knew it was likely to happen. He attacks on instinct, catches her and twists. The chains get in the way, the blade nearly slices his neck open, and she’s pulling it away from the vulnerable spot before he can do the same. He doesn’t understand, has no time to analyze it because she’s a fast mover and he might be stronger than her, but she’s twisted around again and her left hand thumps against his neck.

He knows he’s been stabbed, didn’t realize she had another weapon, and he releases her to cover the wound. She’s out of his arm reach before he’s even found the thing lodged in his neck. He pulls it out, foolish, but he’s not thinking confused but the warm plastic contours and the lack of biting metal.

The syringe is a surprise, and as he stares at the empty cylinder he’s yanked out of his neck he knows she’s not going to kill him. She could have killed him any time, from the start she could have done it. But now she’s stained to pull away when her blade got too close to the mark and instead of defending herself properly she’s injected him with something. Something she didn’t want to use or she would have done it straight off.

It’s a little hard to hold onto the needle, and it rolls out of his fingers before he’s decided to put it down. He seeks and finds her, crouched out of arms distance, a gun trained on him, a frenzied look in her eyes. She’s moved on pure instinct and he watches, suddenly tired, as she realizes what she is doing. The angel blade is on the floor between them, dropped by one of them but he’s no longer sure if he’d a hold of it or if she never let it go.

“Last chance.” She warns, sliding her gun back into it’s holster and waiting.

“For what?” He demands, and it’s hard to talk, like his tongue is becoming heavy and thick.

“Leave.” She growls the word, “Get out of him, forever, and I won’t have to do this.”

He’s confused, because he doesn’t understand why she wants it of him. What she thinks the point is. “I can’t do that.” He tries to explain. “I’m not what you think I am.” Because she’s still using an angel blade when any blade would work and he knows she thinks he’s more than human, but that hasn’t been the case for some time. “I’m not the same anymore, I can’t just leave.”

“I’m not the same either.” She’s waiting for something, just watching him, and he wonders again what she’s injected him with. “But I’m still Claire Novak, and that’s still my dad you’re wearing.” Which he knows is wrong, but he can’t quite frame why because it’s getting harder to focus. “I want him back.”

“Wait…” The idea is there, it’s wiggly and hard to pin down but he knows it’s important. It’s like they aren’t speaking the same language and he’s finally found the key to why hers is different. He’s trying to piece it together but his body’s sagging, slowing creeping towards the ground and he’d felt tired before, but this is something else, heavy and unbeatable. He knows there’s adrenaline in his system, trying to wake him up, but it does nothing against the tide thickening his limbs and making them heavy.

When she comes towards him again, he tries to fend her off, but he can’t get his limbs to obey and she avoids the clumsy attempt. Her hand settles, instead, on his chest and she pushes back. He tries to resist but his body folds back against the ground under her guidance.

“What did you do?” He doesn't know what’s happening just that he can’t move. He can still feel the breeze against his skin, the cold air prickling it into goose-bumps, but he can’t make his muscles move at his command, barely managing to flex his fingers and swallow against his still dry throat.

She takes full advantage of it. Takes his limbs and rearranges them, stretches him out. Positions him face up and arms spread as far as the chains will allow. He expects her to go back to her spell, but instead she sits beside him loosens his tie, and then undoes his shirt, slipping each button open until his chest is bared.

“Wait-“ He slurs it out around the thickness of his tongue.

She’s picked up the angel blade again but she hesitates, the sharp edge hovering over his chest. He thinks maybe she will kill him after all, maybe the spell needs him dead after all, maybe she was just waiting for the right time instead of keeping him alive for something else entirely. She’s working herself up to the task though, and he needs to stop her, now.

“I’m not-“

The first cut surprises him, because he feels it. Then he really feels it because the shock of the intrusion isn’t immediately registered, but it’s the agony of open flesh and severed nerves that makes him cry out. He can’t move his body, can’t pull away from her as she sets her face in determination, check the diary by his knee and makes another incision with the tip of the angel blade.

And then she starts chanting in Enochian.

It’s the first time he understands what she’s saying, he’s used Enochian so often that it’s instinctual, even in this human body. And for the first time he understands.

“No.” He recoils with the realization. “No.” He tries to struggle, to get out from under her blade, but she keeps cutting. Slicing a circle into his chest and he _knows_. He knows and of course he hadn’t considered it, because it’s not possible. “I’m not-“ He panics, “This is an extraction spell.” He stalls. “You’re using kin's ties, kin's blood, kin's tears and hair.” He can see the scar on her chest, newly formed, cut into for this same spell. “The child’s soul.” And the horror of it, of grounding this spell in herself, of using her own life blood to drag the angel out of her father’s body destroys him.

This isn’t a witch whose enacting revenge, it’s not a spirit of malice that’s grown over years of neglect. This is a little girl, desperately fighting, against hope, to save her father. A father that is gone.

“Claire,” He pleads, voice slurred against the pull of the drugs she’s put in him. A risk. A risk for a spell like this and she did it anyway because she really has nothing to lose. “You shouldn’t have this.” No-one should, it’s old testament, wiped from human knowledge. The things that would have to be traded, the price that would have to be paid for something this forgotten. “What did you do to get this?” More than a life, more than a soul, there is no way the price was less. The things in the dark the might know this, they did not give things to sweet little girls who want their father back.

“None of your business.” She snaps around the spell, her body sways minutely and she pulls the blade away eyes shutting while she rebalances. He can not see his chest but he knows she’s etching out the angel banishing sigil, he’s had it engraved there before but he’d been an angel then, it hadn’t hurt as much as this does.

“You can’t do this.” He tries to explain, “It-this kind of spell, on a human. It will backlash. It will kill me, and it will kill you.”

“You’re not human.” She corrects pushing his shirt aside to cut the edges of the sigil in. It tears his flesh, and he’s glad he can’t move, because he could never have stayed still through this.

“I am.” He argues desperately. “Your father-“ He stalls, he thought she’d known, he’d thought this was his punishment, but she didn’t know. How would she? And he knows this isn’t how you tell someone, but she’s left him with no other way and that’s his fault as well. “Your father is dead.” She doesn’t even flinch, but she’s not cutting. “There’s nothing left of him. He’s gone. I am human, and if you do this you will kill me.”

“Like you killed my father?” Her voice is deceptively calm, and he is confused by the stillness.

“I didn’t-“

“No.” She cuts him off. “No. You trapped him in an eternity of conscious suffering.” She tries to spit the words, but there’s a tremble in her tone she can’t disguise. “You used his love for me to make him say yes.” Her voice breaks, and he watches crystalline tears slide past her control, first one, then two, and she can’t control them. Her horror when she feels them, the way she pulls away from him, tries to conceal it… she’s breaking and can’t stop it.

“I’m sorry.” He tells her, again. But he knows what he’s done now. He didn’t feel it at the time, barely a flicker of remorse when he let Jimmy Novak make his sacrifice. He could have stayed in her, she’s said yes, but an adult body was stronger and easier to manipulate so he’d made the switch. He’d never considered what he was leaving behind. “This was my fault, I did this. It was never you-“

“I know that!” Her voice breaks on the scream, the tears are still there, squeezing past her defenses and his heart breaks for her. He’s driven her to this, his carelessness, his arrogance.

“Please-“ he doesn’t think he deserves to be saved, but he repeats it anyway, “this will kill me.”

She wipes the tears back, and puts herself back under control. Her eyes are red, there’s blood on her face and hands, his blood. It must be everywhere, and he thinks that if she gave him a chance again, he would not be able to hurt her. Her body stills, soft eyes harden again and she pulls herself tight into the shell she’s created so she can deal with this world he threw her into.

“If my father is already dead, then I don’t care.” The emotion is gone from her voice, only the fighter left to face this battle. Castiel knows the fighter can not be reasoned with, it’s the girl he needs at the surface, but he’s not sure if he can draw her out again.

“What I did,” he strains through the drugs, “I was arrogant and foolish, and thought I could do what I wanted with my vassal. But I know now.” It took so much for him to learn. “I know how important each life is. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t let him go when he tried to leave. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him from dying when he did. But he’s dead. He’s dead.”

“I’m sick of hearing you talk.” She twists his tie up around his mouth and he can’t move away, pulls it tight and lifts his head to tie it behind his head. He tries to talk through it, but with the drugs in his system and the gag it sounds like garbled nonsense.

She sits back down beside him, resting back on her heels as she looks over the banishing sigil she’s carved so far, then with cold precision finishes the task. Castiel can’t voice words, but he screams through the gag, and she never flinches, and doesn’t stop.

  

Her hands are shaking so she crushes them together and clings to herself. There are tears at the back of her eyes, trying to push through her defenses, but she won’t let them out again. They’ve had their chance today.

He’s unconscious, but still small noises against the gag. He can’t move yet, but the drug will wear away before the spell is done. She didn’t want to use it, but now she’s glad she had. No-one could have stayed still throughout that and she’d been foolish to think an angel couldn’t feel pain just because of it’s nature. Of course they felt pain, anything that can die can feel pain, and there were enough unclaimed angel blades to tell that story.

There’s blood on her hands, it’s gotten everywhere, like grains of stand sneaking and creeping when she thought it would be neat. She’d hoped it would be neat.

His white shirt is splattered in the diluted stains of his blood, little of it hers. The floor dripped on when she pulled the blade away. The floor is still clean though, clean enough for the spell. His blood, hers, neither would be contaminants in this spell.

His words are like tiny barbed teeth that dig in below her skin and leave impressions. She doesn’t want them there, and if her hands would stop shaking she’d brush them away, but her hands won’t stop. She reminds herself that he would say it, that it’s his prerogative to lie, that he wants this vassal and he doesn’t care the trauma she puts it through to try and eject him. She reminds herself that this is a monster, and like every monster she’s seen since he swept into her life, their words are nothing but poison to trick you.

She reminds herself that she is strong enough to do this, and that is what stills her shaking. The reminder that this task was on her shoulders, not his. There was no-one else who could or would do what had to be done. She’d known that when she’d first told her mother they had to save him, and her mother had told her to go back to bed. When she’d laid in that bed and realized her mother was afraid, and when she’d sworn not to betray her father’s love by hiding in shadows with fake names and forged histories.

This was her trial.

  

Castiel - angel - monster, he is out cold until she slices through the palm of his left hand with the tip of the angel blade. He flares back to life, eyes snapping wide and trying to jerk away, but his limbs are lax and unresponsive and she only feels the barest of tugs. It is easy to settle the hand over the empty porcelain bowl to collect the thick trickling blood. He follows with his eyes as she does the same to his other hand, and his cry is just as loud, and his attempt to move rattles the first bowl, but not enough to upturn it. She aligns the second bowl and sits behind his head, watching the seep of blood as it tracks out of his body.

“Not long now.” He doesn’t respond, stares at her blankly so measures out his blood by the drop. Factors in how much is lost already, gathers the bowls and stands on strained legs.

At her table she lifts the bronze knife to her own palm and slices deep. The pain barely registers, her body too numb with exhaustion, but she watches the opened flesh as the blood drips down her arm and onto the floor, and knows it should hurt. When she remembers herself she holds that hand over the same bowl his left bleed into squeezing out the blood to hurry along the step. Then does the same to her right, and she feels that in both her hands, but she does not stop until each bowl is full.

There is no time to repair damage, and her father is bleeding out just as fast as she is. So she moves on through the dizzy sensation, recites the right words as she pours both into the large mix. Blood, bone, heart, soul, it’s all in there now. Nature and hope, demand and penance. It shimmers in its bowl, red against white, enough blood to drown a man.

“Please.” She begs of the spell, sliding her fingers into the red mess and letting it draw, once more, from the center of her being. She breathes through the pull, shallow and careful and in control and for each breath she draws in it draws more of her out. She waits until the magic is appeased before withdrawing her fingers, and then she takes the concoction back to the monster’s side.

There’s not enough light to read the diary but a candle gives some illumination. Her memory is less clear than she thought it would be, like a film has come down over her and she can not pierce it. So she checks her notes, and around the angels prone figure she moves, painting the floor with bloodied sigils. She doesn’t remember what they mean anymore, not sure if she ever knew, but she draws them out with swipes of her hand, rewetting her fingers in the bowl and splashing red in intricate designs.

The bowl sloshes when she feels too dizzy to hold it straight, blood slops over the side and onto the floor in tiny puddles and drips. She does not stop until they are all etched out clear and solid and recognizable.

The next step is simpler, it requires the simplest memories. Show the form of the beast. And she knows its form, its wings, has felt them heavy on her back and in her mind. She takes another handful of blood and behind his shoulders begins to paint the monster as she knows it. She mutters the step to herself, as a reminder when she forgets what she’s doing for a moment, she mutters it and works. Blooding the ground around them as she works to build him the silhouette of wings.

  

The hangars are old and falling apart, but from what they can see it’s sealed up tight, unless they want to climb a curved tin roof. Since neither of them are cat burglars they settle on the side door. It’ll make the least noise, and they can’t hear anyone on the other side of it. Doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a safer bet than jumping in through the glass paneled door of the hangar with the lights on. It also includes less chance of cutting themselves open with shattering glass.

There’s a chain on the door, shiny and new, with an equally new padlock. Sam kneels down to pick the thing while Dean keeps guard.

There’s nothing around them but sand and scrub. He can’t even see the Impala anymore, but he knows exactly which direction it’s in. He’s good at mapping, if John had graded them on those sort of things Dean would have aced mental mapping. Sam would have him beat on Latin though and Dean’s fine with that. Being able to find yourself when lost seemed so much more useful until they’d run into their first demon and he’s learnt what he needs to know now.

“You okay?” Dean glances down, Sam’s taking longer than he should, a padlock only has so many pins and this isn’t rocket science.

“Fine.” But Sam is frowning at the padlock and there’s a sheen of sweat on his brow. “Stop asking that.” He snipes as an after thought as the lock clicks open.

“Sure.” Dean agrees catching the chain before it can rattle and pulling it through to drop on the sand. It barely makes a noise. The door creaks a little when he pulls it out, but it’s the hand on his arm that stops him from going in.

He looks back and Sam, he knows immediately, is not Sam again. He curses to himself.

“I can not go in there, Dean.” Zeke explains, and it’s not an ultimatum, which is good because they haven’t found any angels yet.

“Well you’ve come this far-“ Dean attempts.

“There is warding.” Zeke explains.

“Angel warding?” Dean can’t hide his excitement because if there’s angel warding, there aren’t angels and if there aren’t angels every concern he’s had about Zeke evacuating his brothers body in self preservation is null and void. He grins in spite of himself.

“Powerful warding.” Zeke clarifies.

“Right.” Dean nearly bounces. “You and Sam say here. I’ll sort this out.” He’s done this before, after all and he can remember which wards need to be tampered with enough to let the angel in.

“Very well. But I would prefer we leave here soon. I am not comfortable with this situation--“

“As soon as we get Cas.” Dean agrees and slips into the first of the hangars. Nothing attacks him outright, so he clicks his flashlight on and scans the walls. The first of the wards he finds he uses his knife to scratch a line through, breaking it. The next he skips and as quickly as he can he makes his way through the first, then second and third hangars. He stops at the small door leading to the fourth, and he can hear noise through the wall.

He leans his ear up against the wall to listen. He can hear muffled shouting, and he thinks it might be Cas. He can’t be sure but whoever it is isn’t having the best time of it. “Hold on, buddy.” He mutters, sure he can’t be heard over the shouting and makes his silent retreat back to Sam afraid Zeke will take off if given enough time.

“Okay?” He checks with the angel, and the discontent is clear but Zeke nods.

“It will suffice.” Dean wants to get back in there, but again Zeke stops him. “But be aware I will do nothing to help you in there. Castiel can not know I am here.”

“Yeah alright.” Snaps. The tune is getting old. “Now, we got to get back in there.” He motions and Sam blinks at him, puzzled.

“Back?”

Dean sends a silent insult at the angel for his sudden disappearing act and decides ignoring the puzzled question is all he can do.

“Come on Sam.” He grabs an angel blade, in case it’s demons, checks his gun before tucking it into the back of his pants and then moves. Sam is right there with him, question forgotten.

  

Castiel can only hear the murmur of her spell, Enochian and too familiar, in his ear. Can’t quite turn his head to face her anymore, he doesn’t have a soul for it to draw from, he is certain, but it still ebbs his strengths through increments. The banishing sigil on his chest will be the last step, the final focus of all that power and it will rip through him and rip what exists of him apart. Too much power, and no grace to take the brunt of it.

The room smells of blood, thick in his nose, it makes his stomach turn uncomfortably but he is too tired to be sick. His head’s clouded, his eyes strained, and he thinks maybe he should be in more pain, but the pain has started to recede under a thick blanket of cotton wool. It’s almost nice.

She stills next to him, frenzied movements stopping and it’s enough for him to notice. He tracks her blurry figure as she sits lifts her head from it’s focus and distantly he can hear a noise that wasn’t there before. Consistent, beeping, or singing.

There is blood on her, her face smeared with the vile stuff, her hands soaked in it and she doesn’t know. She looks instead at the room around them, before looking to him. She’s on the verge of a decision, and that decision comes when she stands, leaving her spell and chanting.

“Excuse me.” She apologizes, the most polite she has been since dragging him here. And she stands, with no other word, and leaves the room.

“Where are you going?” He asks, but can’t be sure the words even come out. There’s an uncontrollable thrum in his ears and it echoes louder than his own voice.


	9. Part Eight – Recovery

_**Part Eight – Recovery** _

  

There’s a hole in the wall letting light into the third hangar and Dean motions to it and makes the command to lift him.

“Boost me up.” He mouths at his brother when he doesn’t immediately obey. Sam frowns right back at him.

“You lift me up.” Sam mouth back, making the hand motions to match. Dean looks over the height and breadth of his brother and his expression deadpans; There is no way in hell that’s happening. Sam’s expression crunches in annoyance, but he offers his hands, fingers interlaced and Dean’s quick to take the offer.

Silently Sam pushes him higher until Deans looking through the gap in tin walls. The other room is illuminated, a scattering of candles and a light that flickers like it’s about to blow. In the middle of the room, better illuminated than anything else, Cas is laid out and bleeding. Dean scans what he can see, he doesn’t have a view of the whole room, but aside from Cas there’s not another moving soul he can pin down.

He taps Sam’s shoulder twice and his brother drops him down to the ground silently.

In his quietest voice Dean speaks, “I don’t see anyone.”

“Is Cas in there?” Sam leans in close, just as quiet.

“Yeah. And one hell of an altar set up. No chickens’ feet though.”

“Demons?” Sam’s swapping gun for angel blade, but Dean’s not sure. Either way, everything seems to die when stabbed with an angel blade.

“I don’t see anything, but whoever it is ain’t far.” It can’t be, not with Cas trussed out like a Christmas turkey.

“We wait?” Sam’s not sure of that answer, waiting isn’t really in their repertoire.

“I think we have to get in there soon, or he’s going to bleed out.”

“Half cocked?” Sam checks because he’s ready, as ready as they ever are.

“When don’t we?” Dean checks and with a quick smile Dean pushes his way into the room, gun out and blade ready. Sam at his side does the same.

  

The door opens with a bang, but it’s the wrong door. Castiel takes a moment to realize his head is turning and then he twists it to the side and finds Dean and Sam Winchester, weapons ready and scanning the room.

He is rushed with relief, because if they are here he is not going to die. Because Dean responded to his call and found him. Because the brothers had never let him down even when he’d let them down again and again.

“Claire-“ He murmurs out through the gag, and Sam focuses on him. He moves across the room quickly, tugging the gag out of his mouth but weapons still at the ready.

“What was that?” Sam checks.

“Claire.” Castiel manages once more in warning, because she’s going to come back and he needs them to know.

“Who’s Claire?” Dean demands, stepping closer and eyes sharp. Castiel tries to articulate who she is, but the words all jumble together in the back of his sore throat. There are too many conflicting definitions, too much about her he needs to explain but can not.

“Is that an angel banishing sigil?” Dean’s closer now, still covering the room but inching into guard their backs. Sam gets to work trying to pick the padlock holding the chains in place. “Hey, Cas, can you move?” Dean sneaks a look, and Castiel can’t tell what the expression his friend wears because it is too guarded.

Castiel tries to get himself under control, there’s no time to get his thoughts in order but there are things they need to know. Claire she’s, “bleeding.” He manages, and both of them agree with him, but he’s not talking about himself.

“Dean, these things have curses woven into them.” Sam hisses from above Castiel’s head.

“What’s that mean?” Dean keeps getting closer, like he thinks he can help but doesn’t want to turn his back from the room even for a moment.

“Not coming off.” Sam explains but Castiel doesn’t care. He’s not going to die, they won’t let him. But Claire…

“Dean, Sam.” He has their attention, “You need to find her.” He forces the words out despite the lump in his throat, they come easier than he expects.

“Claire?” Dean’s still seeking a target. “What is she?”

“Nothing.” Castiel insists. She isn’t anything. He’d thought she was a monster, a witch, a demon. But she wasn’t anything.

“Are you on something?” Dean demands, and he looks down to Castiel with concern.

Castiel hears Sam shout something, and he sees Claire a moment later behind Dean a gun targeted on his back.

“Move an inch,” she warns, “and you’ll regret it.”

  

There is half a second, the skip of a heartbeat, before Dean’s ready to respond to the threat. Then behind him he hears the gun’s slide ratcheting into place and that’s for his benefit because anyone going into a fight without a bullet in the chamber’s a fool. And anyone who snuck up behind him while he was on guard can not be a fool.

He assesses, Sam is watching the girl behind him, and Cas is bleeding out. He could take a hit, he’s been shot before, and if it’s in the right spot and he can get a shot off-

“And you might be fast,” Her voice is cold warning, “but I’m not aiming at you.”

He looks to Sam for an answer to that, because Sam’s watching her not him, and he trusts his brothers judgment in a gunfight. Sam meets his eyes and gives the smallest shake of his head. Dean lets his shoulders relax, whatever she’s threatening to do back there he doesn’t want it done.

“Cas.” He side-tracks. “Did you get kidnapped by a little girl?” And maybe Cas could have given them more than just her name, because ‘Claire didn’t actually tell them what they’re dealing with.

“You, on the floor.” She instructs, “Weapons down, slowly.” Dean goes to move as Sam lowers his weapons. “Not you, Dean.”

“I didn’t know we’d been introduced.” Dean fires back even as Sam lets his weapons go. Dean does not like either of them being disarmed.

“Your turn, weapons on the ground.” And Dean takes Sam’s cue and sets angel blade and shot gun down. To make this easier he turns to face her as he stands.

There’s blood all over the floor, he knew that, but he can see exactly how it got there. She has blood all over her. Her jeans are splattered, the knees soaked through, and her hands are both dripping blood from stained fingers. One of those hands are wrapped around a semi-automatic pistol pointed to the front of the hangar. He’s busy remembering the number of rounds, 18 maximum, before he notices the gasoline tanker she’s aiming at.

“Did they leave that full?” He’s incredulous, he nearly bankrupts credit card companies keeping the Impala fuelled, it was like leaving gold laying around and he’d yet to see anyone do that.

“They were dead.” She states it bluntly and he doesn’t know if she killed them, or they died some other way, but the way she looks he can’t discount the first option.

“Awesome.” It is anything but, and his sarcasm is so thick they all know what he’s thinking. “Now, lets not do anything we’ll regret.” He eases, raising his hands and that’s enough for her finger to twitch so he stops moving all together. He plots it out, she’ll have to tie them up, one at a time, maybe make Sam tie him down first, then finish the job herself. They could do the ties badly, but she might know knots and they might not get another chance--

Deans brain stumbles over an idea and his entire body relaxes with a plan.

“I’ve always wanted to see one of them explode.” He gives her a cocky smile. “You should shoot it.”

“Dean!” Sam admonishes.

“What?” She demands, and her confusion is his best chance. He lunges at her, full body slamming into the small thing. Her gun fires on impact, and he’s got her down on the floor. She struggles, gun coming up, and he catches her wrist with both of his and twists to break.

“Dean, don’t hurt her!” Cas shouts in panic, and Dean’s not inexperienced enough to look away from the girl pinned below him but he does abort the action. He changes the hold, pinches the nerve and the weapon falls out of her hand into his own. The handle is coated in blood and he’s impressed she kept her hold on it, more so when he sees the cuts gorged out across her palm.

He still turns it onto her the moment he has a hold of it. His finger rests on the trigger as he catches his breath.

“Everyone okay?” He calls back to Sam.

“She shot the truck.” Sam replies unimpressed and that Dean does glance at. There’s a hole towards the bottom rear of the tank, and there is gasoline spurting out across the floor inching towards them.

“Dean.” Cas warns, voice thick and gravelly. “Don't hurt her. She’s under my protection.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Cas? She’s trying to kill you.” Dean demands, not moving his eyes from the girl glaring up at him. If she has another weapon on her she’s going to use it, he knows the look of someone with nothing to lose and he is not giving her the chance.

“She is my responsibility.” And the damn idiot is serious.

“No, I’m not.” She spits back at the angel, furious.

“Sam?” Dean checks, because Sam might have a better idea of what is happening then he does. If they’re lucky.

“You let her shoot the tank.” Sam articulates clearly, annoyed. Dean shrugs and glances, the gasoline’s already slowed, a trickle instead of a gush and that’s just as well.

“You both watch too many action movies.” Maybe he spent too many hours that one summer shooting canisters of gasoline to try and get them to explode, but he’d thought it was common knowledge that it took more than a bullet to ignite the stuff.

While he’s looking away she moves, and he doesn’t hesitate to push the barrel against her temple. “Move again and I will shoot you clean through,” he warns, “Cas’ protection or not.”


	10. Part Nine – Guttering

_**Part Nine – Guttering** _

  

He stands up, gun still trained on her and Claire doesn’t move. She can see what’s happening, can hear it too, but she’s not taking a bullet until she has to. The moon is high, she can see the edges of it through the roof’s glass panels and time is running out. The spells half done, the ingredients used, there’s no do-overs, no waiting until the next chance and trying again. The Winchesters, maybe even the monster, will find a way to circumvent anything she doesn’t achieve today. She’s learnt there are ways to do everything, if you are willing to spill enough blood, and Winchesters always seem happy to spill blood.

She watches Dean step away from her, checking on Castiel, the monster, but he’s still got her targeted with her own gun and his aim never waivers. She breathes deep, tries to still the tremor that’s set into her limbs, and think clearly. Things are foggy, she’s probably lost too much blood and if it keeps up she’ll go into shock. She’d timed it, made measurements and calculations in her diary, so that she had time to finish before tending to wounds. But they’ve wedged minutes into the equation and what was fine before is shredded now.

They’ve probably tended to the monster’s wounds, wrapped them up, contaminated the spell. Who knows which of the sigils they will have scuffed out with heavy work boots. She fights the fury the idea edges into life, it will not help her and if they’ve marred the markings she just has to do them again. Easy. So long as they don’t upend the bowl she can still fix this.

“What do we think, Sammy?”

“This is dark magic, Dean.” The tall one sounds awed and if she didn’t know them from reputation she’d guess scared. But she knows them better than that. “Blood magic like this… I’ve seen things like this, in books at the bunker, but not in practice.”

Dean steps up to her again, and it’s the face of a killer she’s staring at. She’s not afraid of him either, she’s met killers before, but she does know to keep herself in check in their presence.

“Where’d you learn this, girl?” The demand is foolish, but the name…

“My name is Claire.” She grinds out, gun be damned she will not be addressed like that by these men. “Claire Novak.” She doesn’t expect them to remember like she did the angel, just another day for them, it shouldn’t have been for him.

“Novak?” Dean mouths the name, face scrunched up as he tries to remember it, but the name means nothing to him.

“Dean,” the tone is cautious, guarded, “it’s his daughter.” Sam’s looking at her, really looking for the first time since entering the room.

“Cas doesn’t have kids.” he dismisses.

“His vassal’s daughter.” Those eyes are still locked on her, and she doesn’t care what they see. These men, they are no better than the monster. She should have put a bullet in both of them rather than risk the spell.

“What, the little girl? That Claire?” Dean looks her over, skims her features and shakes his head. “No way, she was tiny.” He strikes it off with a hand motion and she pushes herself up to glare. The guns on her, both his hands steadying it, but she’s not moving further.

“That was over five years ago, Dean Winchester.”

Her remains confused, like this is a soap opera and he’s lost track of identical siblings. She seethes.

“We saved your life.” He snaps at her, anger nothing to match her own.

“Thanks.” She sneers right back, because if it hadn’t been for any of them her life never would have needed saving. She could be at school, complaining about boyfriends, hating her father for little silly things she can’t even comprehend now, but they took it from her and never once looked back.

“Can’t please anybody.” Dean turns his attention away, done with her, and focuses on his brother and the monster. “How we doing, Sammy?”

“I can’t do anything with these.” Sam rattles the chains, probably trying to get them off still. She can’t see it, but it makes sense.

“Bolt cutters?” Dean offers up.

“I don’t think that’s going to cut it.” And Dean makes a little pleased noise at the accidental pun. His brother lets out a sigh, so drenched in long suffering it’s impossible to take as anything else.

“Try Kevin.” Is Dean’s next helpful suggestion. Claire is distracted from the answer, from everything else, when she feels liquid pool against her elbow. She makes sure Dean isn’t looking and risks a look. It’s not blood, far too much, far too thin, but it is gasoline. It’s still coming out of the small hole her bullet punched in the tank. Small ebbs of it squeezing through and soaking the ground. It’s travelled a long way to get to her, the hangar is long, but she can smell it now, mineral rich and heavy.

She turns her eyes back forwards and inches her fingers towards her pocket. Dean is checking on the angel, yet again, like a pathological need to make sure the other man is still with them. “You okay there, Cas?”

“I would prefer” - she notes he’s got his voice back, still gravelly and sore, but the dexterity to the worlds is clearer - “not to be bound to the floor anymore. The concrete is cold and extremely uncomfortable. He can probably already move a little, and soon the drug will be out of his system. Another factor of time they’ve ruined. It’ll be okay, she consoles herself, he only had to hold still while she built the banishing sigil. The spell itself would do the rest.

Dean turns back to her and she stills her movements. “Alright, girl--“

“Claire.”

“Claire.” He parrots back, annoyed. “Let him up.” He motions with the gun to the angel and his brother and even though the guns not on her she keeps from moving.

“What’s the time?” She checks, because it has to be late and it’ll come down to seconds not minutes as she originally planned.

“Let him up.” He demands, and she just smiles back at him, happy to have him wrong footed.

“Can’t.” She taunts.

“Why not?” He’s getting angrier, in the face of her easy, but she can’t crush the feeling because she has a way out and they haven’t seen it yet.

“Because I don't want to.” She snaps back at him, and she can see the anger flare up in him. See the moment he considers just shooting her to see if it’ll free his ‘friend’. It is nothing to match the anger she feels, nothing to even come near it. He let his father go to hell, what would he know of loyalty?

He looks away, to his monster or his brother she doesn’t care, her sleeve is starting to soak up the gasoline and if she’s going to do it it has to be now. The lighter is easy to find, big, square, metal, and she flicks it open and sparks the flame even before Dean Winchester has turned back to her, alerted by the sound. She lets the lighter fall, and in a flash the fire’s burnt up her left arm and towards the truck.

She risks it, rolls away from the coming storm, he fires and misses, and then there isn’t time for any of them to realize exactly what’s happening before the fire’s crawled up the streaming leak and snuck inside. She rolls again, squashes the fire on sleeved arm as it licks through material to sear away flesh.

A noise cracks through the air, tearing metal, a pulse where that might be all there is, and then the tank explodes.

  

He’s on the floor, and so is she, but Sam and Dean aren’t down and they get thrown. Fire scorches the room and then recedes, black smoke thick in its place. The world has slowed. Bits of metal fall to the ground around the room, shaken loose from the explosion and he can not hear any of it over the ringing in his ears.

Castiel forces himself up. His limbs shake and strain, but he raises his upper body to look. Sam and Dean are down but recovering, locating weapons through the haze. Claire however is moving.

He tries to order her to stop, but he’s not sure if words come out at all just that his mouth moves and his throat shifts.

She darts past both Winchesters towards her alter, and Castiel tries to warn them with words but still he can only hear ringing. He can’t see what she’s doing and needs to. He fumbles upwards, forgets the chains and is tugged down when he pulls too hard.

“No.” He hears it this time, muffled but there. He can hear other things too, Dean and Sam shouting, the roar of a fire. But that is nothing when he twists around to see her.

She has something in her hands, retrieved from the floor where the altar’s contents have been thrown. He doesn’t know what it is, can’t see clearly through the black smoke in the room, but he can see her and it is all he needs to know. She is not angry, not stone faced and sober, not passionate or desperate; Claire Novak is terrified.

“Don’t.” He begs, anything to not have to see what she might do. She’s hesitating, taking seconds that might be her undoing and Cas will kill them if they hurt her but she has to be stopped before she can’t undo it. “You have to- you have to stop this, Claire.”

She looks at him and he see’s the moment fear is replaced with something stronger.

“No.” He tries once more, but it does nothing to stop her uncorking the bottle and drinking it down. It spills out of her mouth, thick and black, oozes down the edges of her mouth and down her neck. She drinks it all.

He hears Sam’s ordered, “Put it down!” but it’s too late.

The vial hits the floor, slipping from between lax fingers, it rolls crystalline across the floor. Claire stares ahead of herself, blank, and pale.

Dean and Sam are shouting still, voices getting louder, imperatives strong, but he can not look away. His waits, breath held, for the backlash.

Her throat flutters, a cough pushes past tightly held lips. Then another, and another, until she’s heaving onto the ground, thick black liquid. More than she drank, more than the vial could have held. She expels it in gasping choking heaves, there’s no time to breath in, her body quakes with each spasm and Castiel watches it, lost to the ability to stop any of this.

Her first breath in is rattily, and he can’t see her face because she’s bowed over across the floor, but her first breath in is loud and rattles with the echo of an abused throat. Her shoulders move with each breath in and out, rise and fall. There’s black around her, too much. There are so many spells, so many potions, he can’t begin to guess.

“Claire?” He asks, and it’s soft, shocked, almost silent to his ears, but she looks up at him, face wet and stained, barely recognizable as the girl who brought him here, yet alone the child he left behind so long ago. There’s black in her eyes, creeping in from the edges, black ready to steal the blue away. She’s stricken and worn, given half her soul to a spell that still festers around him, half her life to making this happen, and she’s given something else now. “What did you drink?” He asks it. The Winchesters have stopped shouting but they haven’t shot her, because he told them not to. He thinks, maybe, he should have let them kill her.

Her teeth are grey with diluted black when she smiles at him, a broken smile. “Virgin’s blood, whore’s blood,” she recites, “demon’s blood, saint’s. God’s blood, man’s blood, child’s, beast.” He knows the list, can see it unfold with each ingredient. It is a long list, seventy-nine in all, and it is not good.

“Dean,” he does not look away from darkening eyes, “shoot her.”


	11. Part Ten – Dying

_**Part Ten – Dying** _

  

Dean doesn’t need to be told twice, he’s done worse things for less reason before, so he pulls the trigger and is thrown back against the wall. The air’s knocked out of him, his gun dropped with a convulsion of his muscles.

“Sam! Dean!” Castiel calls, and Dean looks right to find Sam pinned to the wall next to him. There’s nothing visible holding them, just a force holding them there. He’s experiences it enough times with demons that he doesn’t panic. Instead he seeks out the source, Claire.

She hasn’t moved, but her hand is held out between them holding him and his brother to the wall. He didn’t think she had it in her, and if she did, he’s not sure why she waited this long to do it. His bullets gone wild somewhere in the hangar, completely missed the target, by how much he’s unsure, but she’s not bleeding any more than she was before.

“Stop this.” Cas orders the girl, there’s a new slur to his voice, and considering the blood pooled around him Dean doesn’t want to think about it’s reason for it being there. “Claire, listen to me.” Cas keeps ordering, but the girl’s not listening to anything.

She’s holding that hand at them, and they aren’t moving, but she’s also inching across the floor, half crawling back towards Cas. She shouldn’t be moving, too broken, too bleeding, but something in her is as hard as nails and he can see she’s not going to stop until she’s been put down.

“Your father is dead, Claire. There is nothing left to save.” She shudders, and Dean can’t be sure if it’s what Cas is saying or the magic eating her from the inside.

“She’s trying to banish him.” Sam awes.

“What?” Dean hisses, trying to keep his voice low because she’s barely holding it together and if she forgets about them, even for a second, it might be enough.

“She’s trying to banish Castiel from her father’s body.” Sam explains, just as tight lipped. Dean turns the idea in his head. He’s had so long to think of Cas as Cas, even before he became human, that he hadn’t thought it, even when she’d been introduced. It makes sense, now, why Cas hadn’t wanted them to hurt her. Makes sense because the act of what she’s trying to do, however uninformed, is good. Hell, there’d been times in that first year, before Cas had turned his back on heaven, Dean would have helped her out if she’d asked.

She doesn't listen to Cas, drags herself back over to the bowl of blood she’d left by Castiel's side, half spilled on the cement floor and with a strained voice, coughing between words, she starts to chant. Cas tries to stop her, physically tries to reach for her and she fumbles out of his reach.

Cas is as tired as her, no reflexes to speak of, and it’s like watching to hobbling drunks on a pier try and avoid walking into each other, but with more blood. She smears the blood across the floor, retracing designs already laid. It barely takes her a minute to unsmudge boot marks and retrace the outline of wings.

“You can’t maintain this.” Sam calls out, and it’s true, the skin around her eyes is white, but it’s the black and red seeping into the parts that should be white that are the most telling. “You can’t keep us back and do what you’re trying to do.” Sam presses, trying to reason and persuade.

She pulls the book sitting by Cas towards herself, and Cas tries again to stop her, but his legs don’t seem to be responding, and his hands are still locked down.

“Not good, Sam.” Dean is hoping his brother has an out because he’s tapped out with no weapons.

“He’s right.” Sam tries again, “Your father died when Cas died.”

Miracle of miracles she looks up from her diary to them. Her entire demeanor is exhausted, and Dean is impressed by her staying power.

“Doesn’t look dead… to me.” She tries to spit it out, but her tone is softening, less controlled.

“The first time.” Sam explains.

“He’s died a lot.” Dean offers up with an apologetic smile, because really what kind of lives do they live that he can say that so casually?

“Claire, we aren’t lying.” Sam’s using his agreeable voice, the one he uses to console witnesses and bereaved strangers.

“Oh? A Winchester, not lying?” Her laugh is scratchy and weak. “Let me just drop everything and walk away right now.”

“Sarcastic much?” Dean bites back perturbed by the assumption that they never tell the truth. Occasionally they lied, but only ever when they needed to.

“He should be dead tree times over, at least.” Sam keeps pushing. “We don’t even know why he’s still alive.”

She considers them, and maybe she considers what they’re saying but her face is open and readable and Dean can see the minute she ticks back over into abandon.

“Then maybe, maybe he’ll survive this too?”

Cas tries to move, but he’s got next to no control of his body and no way to get far. He tries to push her back, but she sneaks her hand past his limited reach and the second she touches the sigil carved into his chest it flares. Cas screams, gritty and strained as his wounds flash open.

“He won’t survive.” Dean shouts watching those open wounds flare up with an inner light, watching Cas fall back against the ground as they burn him from the inside. “And you know why. He’s not an angel anymore.” He’s frantic, straining against the spell holding him, and it flickers and loosens only to push him back a little harder. “That pain? It’s real. It’s human.” Bitter and desperate he keeps pushing, trying to break through to her.

She’s staring at the burning sigil, at Cas as his life flutters under her command. She’s going to just watch him die.

“And if you do this, you won’t be anymore.” Dean warns. “Do you understand me? You won’t be human.” She shifts, head lolling to the side, hand holding him in place drooping between them. If he distracts her, even for a minute, she could burn herself out before finishing the spell. He can’t waste time on precious concerns for people who make bad choices, he hasn’t gotten this far by putting others above his family, and Cas is family.

He stares into blue eyes, ignores the black and red infecting them, and keeps distracting. “You will have given up what your father gave his life to protect.” And maybe it’s already gone, but her hand drops, eyes wide as she stares at him, and she’s still marred and dirty, but there’s a spark of humanity in there, and maybe that’s enough.

He looks to Cas, gauging how far gone he is, how much damage the spell has done. “This kind of thing is a one way trip to Monster’s Ville. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” There’s no venom in her voice, it’s softer and calm. She looks at them all, one at a time, there’s a vagueness to the motion, like her head is heavy, but there is also accusation. “You’d all know.” He should argue, maybe in another circumstance he would, but he’s done so many things he’s not proud of and neither his brother nor Cas are any less bloodied than he is.

She looks up, not at him, but at the roof and the sky beyond. The moon is shining down, full and bright, and she stares, only the rise and fall of her body as she draws in each labored breath. He doesn’t know what she sees, what she’s waiting for, but he knows time is ticking by and it can not last.

  

“Claire.” His voice is scratched raw, shaken, and barely audible. But she’s right next to him, can feel the pulse of the spell as it works between them, feeding of what’s left of their strengths. It needs time to build, build and break. Time to end.

She does not look at him, does not know what she will do right now if she does.

“It’s true.” he confesses. “I know.” He breathes. “I know what it’s like to be a monster.” He judders, heaves in air through the pain, and she does risk a glance, but only to be sure the spell is still burning, before she looks away again. Staring at the stars above, not the moon, just the things past it. Safe and away, where things can’t be as complicated as they are here. She envies their stillness.

“The things I’ve done…” He reaches a hand to her, fingers touching her arm and sliding away. He doesn’t have the strength to maintain even that contact. It’s amazing he’s still talking. “But it’s not too late.” he pleads.

“For what?” she asks, pure impulse, muddled by exhaustion so thick it’s still trying to pull her in. When the spell is done she’ll let the Winchesters down, and maybe they’ll kill her anyway, but it’s too late to worry about that.

“For you.” He sounds so sincere it’s hard to remember what this thing is, what it’s done. All she can hear is her father pleading with her. If she had the strength she thinks she would gag him, but moving of any kind seems far too great a challenge. There is a stillness to the air that weighs her down, and even the constant pull in her chest doesn’t make the world spin any faster.

“I’m sorry.” he apologizes, “I’m so sorry.” His voice hitches, and she looks but the pain hasn’t increased, nothing has, just the constant pull and draw of the spell as it mounts inside her father’s body. “I didn’t understand, none of us did. We’d been in heaven for so long…” He stops, body clenching as another wave of the spell hits. Under her legs she feels the blood painted floor start to heat.

He catches her arm this time, draws her eyes down to him and Claire does not have the strength to look away again. “There were things happening.” he explains, earnest. “Things we thought were greater than one man’s pain. But we were wrong, Claire. I was wrong.”

There’s sweat pouring from him but even that doesn’t wash away the reminders of what is happening. His chest is burning, ropes of red below the carvings, veins red like larva and the gaps in his wounds white. Below them tiny bubbles build in the blood, working towards boil. She thinks she needs to do something, something important, but she’s using so much energy just holding the Winchesters at bay that anything else is impossible. Still his words sneak in past her, slithering in through the exhaustion and dig in.

“I know it now and I know it’s too late, Claire. I should never have made your father say yes the second time. But this won’t bring him back.” She wishes he didn’t sound so sincere and that her defenses were stronger, but she gets neither of those things and it pulls at her, shakes her, because she doesn’t want to believe him but there is so much honesty in his tone she can’t shake the doubt.

“I don’t know why I was brought back and he wasn’t. I didn’t deserve it. But your father - he’s in heaven now. He has to be. He was a good man and everything he did was for you. To protect you. God,” he grinds out the word, even drained his spite is there, “would never punish that kind of love.”

She watches his crumpled face, the lines at the edges of his eyes, the ashen white color of him, blood’s dripped on him, soot settled between the creases of his brow. He looks old.

He looks old, but her father had never been old, not to her.

Her hands shake, skitter over his skin as she traces the crows feet by his eyes. He’d always had them, but they’ve deepened, hardened and she knows. It pinches insider her, worse than the pain of the spells pull. It pinches and squeezes and her eyes cloud over with tears she’d thought had run out.

“You’re older than you were.” She breaks, because angels do not age, they do not alter or change. Their vassals never change, not until they’ve been used up and thrown away. Discarded and forgotten. But this isn’t her father anymore, and whatever it is, it isn’t an angel either.

  

She falls apart before their eyes. Inch by inch she leans closer to Cas, listens to what he’s saying. They don’t interrupt, because it’s working, whatever Cas is saying is working. Dean can’t quite hear, he catches words, intonations, but there’s a distance between them and Cas can barely talk.

The spell keeps burning throughout, but until she drops her hold on them it’s clear Cas is making the most progress.

“Dean.” Sam whispers, and it’s to draw his attention to the way the force holding them seems to ebb and solidify, waving in and out of consistency.

“If we drop, we take her out.” Dean’s not risking this a second time. Witches are hard at the best of times, but this girl…personal vendettas always make them worse. His gun’s on the floor by his feet, and Sam’s is only a little further way.

“I don’t think we’ll need to.” Sam forgives too quickly and trusts too easily, but he also sees things Dean doesn’t always see. He trusts his brother, despite everything, and if Sam thinks shooting first isn’t on the table Dean’s not sure what they’ll do.

He’s still waiting for her spell to break, her strength to waiver enough for it to snap, but instead she lets them go. The force eases away as she drops her hand, eases and then disappears. He’s got his gun off the floor and aimed before he processes what’s happened.

She’s not looking at either of them, staring at Cas as if he’d shattered her world, and he probably has. There’s tears washing tracks down her cheeks and they pour thick and fast, unassailable.

Dean keeps her chest lined up in his sights, head shots are sloppy, too easy to miss and if she gives him a reason he’s not going to miss again. She’s a fragile thing, broken, exhausted, and bleeding, burns on her arm, cut and crying, but she is still potentially dangerous.

Sam inches closer to the tableau, cautious. He’s halfway there when she makes a choked noise. Neither knew she had a knife on hand, hadn’t seen a flicker of it before now, but she moves so quickly they can’t stop her and the blade slices clean across Cas’ chest and through the banishing sigil.

Sam shouts out a warning, a command to stop, there’s a flare of power, like a tidal wave of magic as it pulses outwards and she drops the knife as quickly as she retrieved it. The pulse heats the air, blinds it with white, and leaves it hazy when his eyes clear. And there at the center Claire Novak is crying, curled up over Cas’ body and there are choked cries wrenching from her.

Dean is ready to kill, finish this now and forever, but Sam’s closer and his gun’s lowered cautiously.

“Can we – are we good now?” Sam steps closer still, and Dean is echoing the approach. In response she cries harder, body wrecked by sobs that sound dirty and horrible.

From below her head, pressed in against the sigil she’s carved out Cas speaks up. His voice is rough gravel but it is proof he is still alive, “I think we’re good now.”


	12. Part Eleven – Bleeding Out

_**Part Eleven – Bleeding Out** _

  

She expects a bullet, maybe she deserves one, instead she’s hauled away from Castiel by strong hands. She doesn’t resist, lets herself crumble to the ground in a boneless pile. The spell’s dead, gone. Right or wrong, she’s ended it. Nothing will ever make it better again. Her father is dead, or she’s given up on him. Whichever way the dice rolls the result is the same. He is gone. Forever. She’s lost him.

How she breathes through the loss she doesn’t know, but she does breathe, she must because she’s still alive when the tears dry up. She could cry forever, she’s sure of it, but her body is pushed past its limits and there is nothing left in her to cry out with.

When she raises her head, forces herself to look at what she’s done her view is blocked by the Winchesters. They’re talking, fussing over Castiel. There’s still a gun pointed at her, but she thinks that’s silly because she doesn’t even have the energy to cry anymore and anything else is meaningless now.

Dean kneels down in front of her but she doesn’t realize until his fingers clicking in front of her face startles her. She blinks at him, has trouble naming him, but it’s unimportant. “He’s going into shock. You’ve bled him out.” Dean articulates clearly, gun on his knee, ready to pull it up on her at a moments notice.

“No.” She turns her head, wonders when she turned away, but all she can see is Sam Winchester’s back as he hovers over Castiel. “No.” She shakes her head. “I was being careful. Always careful.”

“Being careful killing him. Well done.” He’s not pleased, like he wants to put a bullet in her for that alone, and she wishes he would. Anything to stop silence blanketing her thoughts.

“Is he dead?” She can no longer feel her limbs, like they’ve been removed and all that’s left of her in this awareness of what she’s done. He wasn’t innocent, far from it, but he is human and that’s a line she hasn’t had to cross and never wanted to.

“Not yet.” Sam Winchester has a duffle bag at his side, where it came from she’s not sure but she wonders how long she’s been staring into nothing. He’s looking back at her, and she can see blood on his hands. She thinks maybe she’s been staring for a long time. “We need to patch him up, now.” He tells her, Dean silently looming over her. “You were never going to let him die, were you Claire? Not your father, not his body. You must have something--“

“In--“ Dean’s got his gun on her before her hand’s raised all the way to point, she glares at him and points to the door, “the office. Under a table, at the foot of the bed. Everything you need but blood.” Sam follows her instructions, leaves Castiel's side and she has a clear look at him. He’s not moving, but there’s the fine shift of his chest with each breath, not dead, but getting there.

“Why no blood?” Dean asks conversationally, stepping back to Castiel's side, waiting his brother out.

“I can take off the cuffs.” She answers, because that seems more important. She goes to move when he stiffens.

“How about you don’t move” Dean warns, “and you tell me how to get him loose right from where you are?”

“I have to touch them.” She’s careful, knowing he’s ready to shoot her through, still not sure if she cares but knowing the chains won’t unbind until she’s made them. They’d either have to hunt a witch out to cast a counter curse, or cut the cement floor out from under them. “They’re bound to me, alone.”

“Great.” Dean doesn’t let her though, until Sam’s back in the room, med kit in tow. Then she’s allowed to inch closer until she can reach the cuffs. She touches each, enough blood on her hands still to lubricate the counter spell and she wills them to open, just as she willed them closed. They fall away with a rattle, but Castiel does not move to escape, busy being tended by Sam.

When it’s done Dean makes her back up again, unhappy with her so close. She does as she’s told and waits out their efforts. If he dies now she’s made her choice she does not think she could handle it. So she waits to see what side of insanity she’s going to fall into.

  

Castiel never loses consciousness, watches as his friend stitches and treats injuries. His shirt is ruined, his chest little better. Sam raises him to wrap the bandage around ointments and stitches. There are a lot of stitches, Sam counted them under his breath as he went. Castiel couldn’t feel the pain, but he felt the tug of the thread as it pulled through giving flesh. He was very thankful for whatever Sam had injected him with before starting his work.

It’s taken time, Dean even stopped pointing the gun at Claire long enough to take over and stitch up his hands, but they haven’t taken their eyes off her. Castiel can not help doing the same thing but for different reasons. By the time they’ve wrapped him up in a set of jumpers that fit him too well, and a blanket he’s never seen before Castiel has been staring at Claire Novak for over an hour.

“Up you get.” Sam hauls him to standing. It pulls muscles and stitches no matter how gentle the man is but the painkillers still doing a fine fine job of keeping the pain muted under a buzzing haze. Dean gets in under his other arm, solid and warm.

“Sure we should be moving him?” He checks, hand braced against Castiel's chest, struggling to find a spot that isn’t damaged.

“We need to get him to hospital before he really goes into shock, and there isn’t one coming to us.”

Castiel remembers that they are in the middle of a desert. He’s not sure how far they are from a road, or civilization, but he hopes it’s not far. He watches Claire, as the Winchesters guide him to the exit, watches the way she doesn’t move. She’s barely moved at all since letting it end, a shock of her own maybe. He wants them to look her over, stitch up wounds she’s acquired, but the merest hint of it had made all three recoil, Claire more than the other two. The faster they leave, maybe the faster she’ll get to tending to herself. The med kit is spilt all over the scene spread out on a silver blanket.

“Wait.” He pulls from them, and they both make a grab to stop and balance him. He fends them off, because they let him, he’s barely got the strength to fend of a child but they let him go.

She looks up when he approaches her, and she’s still dirty and marred, more blood and soot than skin visible, but the center of her eyes are still blue and he thinks that’s the best sign he could ask for right now.

“Go away.” She orders just as wrecked as he is. If he thought his body could do it he’d crouch down to bring their eyes to level, but his legs are protesting already. He reaches out instead, tries to touch her, but she pulls away before he can make contact and her glare is all he needs to know. “Don’t touch me.”

He pulls the blanket in tighter and reminds himself that he doesn’t deserve any better. “Thank you for sparing my life.”

She shakes her head against his thanks, refuses it outright.

“You are the bravest hunter I have ever met.” He follows, because this girl, this child, tried to take on an angel on her own. She knew what she was signing up for and did it anyway.

“I’m not a hunter.” She denies, quick and bitter.

“Of course you are. For the same reasons they are.” He motions to the Winchesters, not far behind him because they won’t let him fall and a wave of dizziness nearly overwhelms him. “A monster stole your life away.” It’s the thread all hunters have in common, the one thing that links them in their common war. He takes a gamble, desperate to know she’s not out there like other hunters, selfishly desperate to know she’s safe. “It’s not all gone is it? Your mother - you can still go home.”

She laughs a sharp ejection of air and shakes her head viciously. “You can’t give me my father back, and I can’t give her her daughter back. It’s too late for both of us.”

He wants to argue, tell her how much a mother will forgive for their child. He’s never spoken to Amelia Novak, but he’d known her through Jimmy’s eyes. She was a good woman, she’d forgive, forget. But that’s not going to happen, he can see, Claire Novak will never let it happen. “Take care of yourself, Claire.” He offers, his last apology because there is only so much ‘I’m sorry’ can cover.

He’s turned away, heading back to the Winchesters who have watched the exchange with blank faces.

“I wont forgive you.” She interrupts their exit, loud, absolute. “Any of you.”

“I know.” Of course he knows.

Some things are unforgivable.

  

Claire Novak listens to them leave. She listens until the last breath of them has passed from the building, and then in silence she listens some more.

The world keeps spinning outside, keeps breathing. There are animals in the night sky, a chill that bites at her and makes her shiver. There is evil in the dark around her, and she probably put it there.

She waits until there is no chance that they are there anymore, until time has passed so absolutely that she is alone. Only then does she allow herself to move again.


	13. Epilogue

_**Epilogue** _

  

She moves with careful steps, each foot fall mapped before landing. She’s danced this dance before and knows the difference between stealth and slaughter. Her hair’s pulled back, braided and pinned, for now it’s a vanity she allows herself. Tomorrow may be another story.

The lower half of her face is covered, a black form fitting ski mask, it feels tight and restricting and sweat tickles her at the edges but she doesn’t remove it. She’s coated in ash, a thin layer that doggedly clings to clothes and skin masking her scent. It’s enough to get her in the barn without detection.

She counts four, asleep with the midday sun sneaking in through windows blacked out with paint. She lets them sleep, cocooned in nests of blankets, and checks the rest of the warehouse.

There are signs of life littered throughout the building, empty cans of beans, soiled mattresses and empty shopping carts, but there’s no-one alive here. There are two bodies drained dry and rotting. She steps around them with the same silent caution she navigates the broken glass littered through the corridors.

When the building’s clear she returns to her prey, asleep and oblivious. She breaths heavy through the material of her mask and unsheathes her bowie knife. She has two more blades and a machete on her belt, all slicked with dead man’s blood in preparation.

She sizes up the enemy, plots her pathway between them. There’ll be seconds, at best, before they wake up, and she wants as many poisoned as possible before they can mob her. She picks the smallest spritely one to start, judges based on what she’s seen during recon as much as what she sees now.

The knife slices his collarbone, and she has a cut on the second one’s arm before the first one’s scream has woken the others. She throws the knife at the third, misses when it ducks out of the way, and she’s down to two knives. Two knives and two angry vampires at full strength. She pulls another knife from her belt and readies herself.

  

She makes it back to her hovel of a camp with little more than a twisted ankle and a smattering of bruises. There’s one on her lower back, she hasn’t seen it but she knows its as big as a boot and probably twice as black. The ankle causes more trouble when she jars it climbing over the back fence.

At the house’s back door she stops, she has no interest in lingering in daylight, splattered in blood and decked in knives her jacket barely hides, but she takes a moment because the door has been opened while she was gone. The house isn’t derelict but it is unoccupied while a group of lawyers contest the last owner’s will. She was sure to check the details before settling in. There’s nothing for it though, her things are inside, so she withdraws her gun and flicks off the safety, a bullet already in the chamber.

She makes a direct path for the room she’s camped in, careful to be quiet, but doesn’t waste time trying to silent. The room looks out over the back yard, anything in there will have easily seen her approach. This door is unlatched, no effort made to conceal the invasion. She taps the door with her toes and it swings wide, creaking loud.

Dean and Sam Winchester had made themselves at home in her absence. The larger one is on the bucket lounge a computer in his lap, and Dean is resting on the window sill watching the world pass by. Both look up and eye her weapon, neither seems bothered by it.

Disgruntled she rips apart the ski masks velcro and tugs it off her face. Appreciatively breathes in a lungful of cool fresh air and drops the bloodied material by the door. She steps into the room and removes her reflective glasses. That make’s Dean Winchester twitch and she just smiles because she knows how unnerving the permanent red in her eyes is she has to look at it everyday in the mirror. It’s not the only scar she took away from their encounter, but it’s the one everyone sees. It’s only on the edges and most people assume it’s a birthmark but anyone who knows about the darker parts of the world are always careful around her now.

“Here to kill me after all?” She drops the shades next to the ski mask, gun lowered to her side. She sees too, that Dean Winchester has his gun out and ready. It’s not a standoff, it doesn’t need to be, two against one, if she shot Dean she’d be dead in a moment. She knows how the Winchesters work.

Sam shuts his computer, slides it into the bag at his side and focuses on her. “Nice place.” He opens, friendly, calm.

“It was.” She agrees. It’s been a good two weeks, staking out the vampires den each night and sleeping the day away in undisturbed safety. It’s just a shame the water and power are off, but she’s made do, she’s made do with much less before.

Dean rubs his face, huffs a breath and dives in. “Right. We’re here with some friendly advice.” He doesn’t sound friendly but she doesn’t care.

“Where is he?” If they are cutting to the chase she may as well scratch that itch that’s been niggling at her.

“Wherever he was before you dragged him halfway across the country. I’m not his pen pal.” She’d bet her arm he knows where the angel - human is, but she’d also bet that he’d never tell her. Safe though, alive, those things are immediately obvious. She’d wondered one too many times if he’d made it but hadn’t wanted to find out just in case.

If he’s alive they aren’t here for revenge, at least it’s less likely. She steps past Sam Winchester and over to the plastic bucket of water on the bedside table. “What do you want?” She puts her back to them, wets down a towel and carefully wipes the specks of blood from her face. She’s checks the mirror after each square is wiped clean, careful to get it all.

Dean cuts to the chase again, “You drop the magic.” He orders, “You drop the magic or I won’t even have to put a bullet in your skull. Someone else will.” She considers him in the reflection, fingers casual on his gun, ready to treat her like a threat if she so much as acts like one. It’s a miracle Castiel’s desire for her to remain unharmed has staid their hands this long.

“What Dean’s saying is true.” Sam interrupts and she does him the courtesy of turning around, digging blood out from her ear with the corners of the towel. She raises her eyebrows, never got the knack for just one at a time, and waits for him to expand on what’s being said.

“If you keep up with the magic,” Dean snipes, “we will hunt you down. And so will other hunters.”

“They can try.” she counters. It wouldn’t take long for them to find her, she still doesn’t look her age, like age forgot her for a little too long and that only makes it harder to sneak across the country unnoticed. No-one looks at middle aged men walking through crimes scenes, but she always gets noticed.

“They got a hell of a lot more experience than you, girl.” If she were more generous she’d say he sounded worried. She is not that generous.

“But I’m one of you now,” she motions to the blood she’s wearing, vampire blood because the kills were messy and problematic, “I’m part of the club.”

“We don't do magic.” Sam insists, and she doubts that very strongly because there’s always whispers in the air about what they Winchesters have done. Most of it makes her actions pale in comparison. He sees the doubt, he must. “The kind of magic you were doing,” he reasons, “it taints the caster until they don’t even know what they’re doing is wrong.”

“The only reason you’re still alive, performing that hoodoo, is because Cas’ spoke up for you.” Dean bullies in with the reprimand. “Any other day and we would have dropped you right then and there. Age be damned, that was dark magic.”

Sam gives his brother a reproachful look, and she guesses they were of two minds on how to approach her. She mops the back of her neck with the wet towel, less careful of the blood now its nowhere near her mouth.

“It poisons you, Claire.” She’s almost impressed one of them has remembered her name. “And you become worse than the things you hate. We’ve seen it before. More times than you’d think.”

She wipes her hand down on the dirty towel, watching the two men as she considers her answer. She doesn’t want to offer them appeasement, it goes against the grain of her emotions, but she also doesn’t want them tracking her down again. The less she sees of the Winchesters the better her life will be. She gives into the hope of long term peace rather than the short term pleasure of ruffling their feathers.

“Do you see any hex bags here?” She motions wide, the room has her bed roll and travel bags, but everything else was already here, she’s traveling light these days. “You found me, didn’t you? There’s no magic here.” She clarifies when they don’t appear convinced. She gives them time to consider, as long as it takes her to drape the towel over the end of the bed and pick up her gun. “I know what magic does, now get out of my house.”

“You’re squatting.” Dean contends, childish, annoyed.

Sam however is standing and collects his bag. “We’re going.” He steps up to her, and that she doesn’t like because still he was containable, and moving she feels the threat of him. She backs away from him, doesn’t raise her weapon but doesn’t need to. He stops, and instead of giving it to her he sets a slip of paper on the nearest surface. He taps it meaningfully. “This is our number, in case you need it.”

She nods to acknowledge it because he’s waiting and she’s ready for them to leave. Warning delivered, threats handed out, it was time to part ways. Sam understands, he leaves the way he came, Dean lingers.

“So?” She can’t help snapping at him, he’s rubbed her raw since she stepped into the room. He seems as unhappy as she feels, but he steps up to her all the same. He’s almost as tall as his brother, just as imposing, but she feels a childish annoyance at him that stops her from stepping away when he breaches her personal bubble. When he holds out a small white business card she does not take it.

“What?” She stares at the thing, can see blue pen marks scratched across it, something written but she can’t see what at this angle.

“It’s his number.” Dean explains, card held out. “He wanted you to have it.” He shrugs. “You can lose it if you want, I’m not your babysitter. But I told him I’d give it to you.” He stubbornly waits, card held out and she snaps it away from him just to get him out of the room. Apparently it’s all he wants, because he flicks a smile at her and steps out after his brother.

In the silence of the room Claire Novak puts the card in her pocket and carefully finishes washing the blood off her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you just read this whole story? Dear god. *gives you a medal* Thank you for sitting through this whole story. I hope you had fun, I hope it was interesting, and I hope you leave a little feedback.
> 
> Don't forget to check out the [awesome artwork](http://playthefool.livejournal.com/334614.html)that inspired this story!


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